| By Megan Sullivan, Product Manager |
I’m delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources, available in select products this fall 2021. The culmination of a year of research and development, the Learning Centers will provide comprehensive teaching and learning support for faculty and students.
Built with the student researcher in mind, the goal of the Learning Centers is to orient new users with the content and topics available in a digital archive; spark inspiration for new research topics; and provide guidance and best practices for searching, browsing, citing, and reusing primary sources. The Learning Centers will also prove invaluable for faculty and librarians, providing an all-in-one instructional tool that helps students get acclimated with a primary source database.
The Learning Centers will be organized in four key workflow steps based on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and Society of American Archivists (SAA) Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy learning objectives: conceptualize, find, read, and use. Each workflow section features detailed instructional content that’s engaging and accessible. Content includes topic overviews, sample searches, essays by subject experts, step-by-step search strategies, case studies, and discussion questions to encourage further exploration.
The fall 2021 Learning Center launch will include the following Gale Primary Sources products:
- Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790–1920
- Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896–2016
- International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013
- The Mirror Historical Archive, 1903–2000
- Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890–1970
- Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992
- Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II
- Religions of America
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
- The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855–2016
- The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2019
Note: The final product list is subject to change.
Each of these products will have their own Learning Center, with instructional content tailored to that archive’s unique topics and source collections. The Learning Centers will be automatically enabled at no additional charge to your institution if your library already has access to these products.
We plan to approach this as a multiphased effort, with the goal of building Learning Centers for all our digital archives. As we build the Learning Centers for the products above, the Gale Primary Sources team is busy developing content for additional products.
Gale is committed to supporting the teaching and learning needs of our users, and we look forward to bolstering that support with this exciting and highly requested new resource. Please contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions or feedback or would like to preview Learning Center content.
Gale Primary Sources Learning Center (Product screen capture as of August 2021. The actual interface may vary.) 
Gale Primary Sources Learning Center Search (Product screen capture as of August 2021. The actual interface may vary.) 
Gale Primary Sources Learning Center Sample Topics (Product screen capture as of August 2021. The actual interface may vary.)
Meet the Author
Megan Sullivan is a product manager and works on the Gale Primary Sources line of products. She holds a Master of Science in Information with a concentration in Archives and Records Management and has worked and volunteered at several academic libraries. Before moving to her role in product management, Megan was a cataloger in Gale’s Metadata Standards and Services department. In her spare time, she likes to read historical fiction, travel to new places, and spend time with family and friends.