| By Megan Sullivan, Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources |
I’m delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources, available in select archive products this autumn 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 design of the Learning Centers
The Learning Centers will be organised 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: Conceptualise, 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.
Please note: product screen capture as of August 2021, the actual interface may vary.
Which archives will have a Learning Center first?
The autumn 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
Please 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.
Learning Centers will be available at no extra charge!
The Learning Centers will be automatically enabled at no additional charge to your institution if your library already has access to these products.
Please note: product screen capture as of August 2021, the actual interface may vary.
Please note: product screen capture as of August 2021, the actual interface may vary.
Learning Centers for all our archives
We plan to approach this as a multi-phased effort, with the goal of building Learning Centers for all our digital archives. As we build and release the Learning Centers for the products above, the Gale Primary Sources team is busy developing content for additional products.
Contact us to preview the Learning Centers!
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 ([email protected]) if you have any questions or feedback or would like to preview Learning Center content.
To learn more about the research and product development process behind the creation of the Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers, check out:
If you want to read about the earlier release of a Learning Center in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, you may like to read:
If you’re keen to read more about how the Gale archives can be used specifically for teaching and learning, check out:
- Teaching Primary Source Research Skills
- Teaching with Eighteenth Century Collections Online
- Using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab in the Classroom
Blog post cover image citation: Image by Zen Chung available on Pexels.com.
