| By Liz Mason, Vice President of Product, Gale |
At Gale, we understand that it’s important for today’s libraries to bring trustworthy digital content into the natural workflow. To help you achieve that goal, we are rolling out a number of new releases designed to make it easier for discovery and access to Gale content in your library.
PROVIDING EFFORTLESS ACCESS TO YOUR USERS
We’ve leveraged technology to make access to Gale products more seamless. New authentication options provide library patrons with easier access to their library content. This is accomplished through technologies such as GeoIP, which allows us to identify the geographic location of a patron’s computer. From there, we can determine where their local library is located and permit access to that library’s Gale holdings.
BETTER NAVIGATION TO RELIABLE CONTENT
Gale strives to meet users where they research. Accessing Gale content through Google Chrome extensions is an area that is currently in development. Once installed, performing a Google search will execute a search through your library’s Gale holdings. Your patrons will be able to see authoritative content purchased through your library with a single Google search.
EXTEND THE REACH OF YOUR RESOURCES
Many of our products are integrated with G Suite for Education and Microsoft Office 365 collaboration tools. These enable users to easily access, share, save, and download content—including highlights and notes.
DISCOVER MORE
Gale promotes discovery of its online products and databases within many different library discovery services,
including Proquest (Summon), EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), Ex Libris (Primo), OCLC WorldCat Discovery, and TDNet.
USER-DRIVEN IMPROVEMENTS MEAN BUSINESS
Beyond our close working relationships with our third-party product partners, we incorporate user and customer feedback using an iterative software development methodology called Agile. This has brought about some major enhancements to our business products. The upgrades began to take shape last year with Small Business Resource Center. This included the addition of video and audio content, and collaboration tools.
Soon, DemographicsNow will add new functionality to mapping capabilities asfunctionality to mapping capabilities as
well as a new, mobile responsive, easyto-browse interface. A refresh of the Gale Directory Library. This included the addition of video and aplatform is also in progress. This is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2017. This update will include a new user interface, more descriptive information about the content, and workflow improvements designed to make the product more accessible to new users.
TELL US
Our Gale team is always looking for ways to take advantage of technology to make content more useful, discoverable, and intuitive for our customers. Let us know how we can improve the experience at gale.com/tellus.
For the latest technology enhancements, visit blog.gale.com/updates.