New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview

State Papers Online search bar and source design

|By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources|

I am delighted to share that after several years of research and technical preparation, an updated experience for State Papers Online (SPO) will be ready to preview on Monday, August 1, 2022. This will be a “soft launch”, meaning that on this date, users can access the beta version of the new State Papers Online from a link that will be available from the current SPO homepage. We encourage users to try the new experience and send us their feedback. We are also recruiting for paid user interviews and usability testing. We plan to retire the current version of State Papers Online in December 2022 and from that date forward, SPO will be exclusively available in the updated experience.

Read more

Tracing the Young Women’s Christian Association through Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide

YWCA in Gale's Womens's Studies Archive

|By Rachel Holt, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

Rachel is the Acquisitions Editor managing Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series.

This month Gale is proud to announce the launch of the fourth module in its multi-award-winning Women’s Studies Archive series, Female Forerunners Worldwide. Publishing in March 2022 this latest edition to Gale’s Gender Studies programme coincides not only with International Women’s Day but with Women’s History Month, hopefully giving scholars of women’s history, social history, and gender studies much to celebrate.

Read more

The Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers – A Student’s Perspective

Gale Learning Center

│By Ellie Brosnan, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

Primary sources are central to a range of academic disciplines but particularly History where the need to engage independently and deeply with archival material grows as students progress through their course. I remember well the way we were introduced to History and the concept of primary sources at school, making our own mocked-up documents. Emulating figures from the past, we wrote on tea-stained paper, imagining how past individuals might have felt about the events of their time. This was great fun but, as one progresses through the education system and moves on to analysing real historical documents, our engagement with History must become increasingly sophisticated and, by university-level, the quantity and complexity of the primary sources with which we must engage can become overwhelming. Plus, the breadth of questions we must ask – who wrote the source and why – on top of the broader context in which it was created, is a lot to recognise, understand and consider. This is where Gale’s Learning Centers come in! Released in October 2021, they help students get to grips with a primary source archive. Currently included in twelve of the Gale Primary Sources archives, they will later be available in all Gale archives.

Read more

New Experience for Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Gale Digital Scholar Lab

|By Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Management team|

Gale Digital Scholar Lab creates new possibilities by offering solutions to the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today. Since its launch in 2018, the team has engaged with librarians, instructors, and students to find out what they’d like to see in the tool and how they use it for research, teaching, and learning. Based on those continuous conversations, the team regularly makes improvements to the user experience.

Read more

Coming Soon: Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources

Student studying on laptop and notebook

| 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.

Read more

User Feedback Directs Gale’s Product Development

Video call

│By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Here at Gale, our users are central to what we do – understanding their perspectives and opinions, and then using that to guide our product development, is something close to our hearts. In 2019, the Gale Primary Sources publishing team established a taskforce which specifically sought to improve our knowledge of what was going on in our customer’s heads in relation to Teaching and Learning – and beyond.

Read more

Teaching with Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Primary Source image combined with female using laptop and writing on paper.

│By Julia de Mowbray, Publisher at Gale│

Now Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) is approaching its eighteenth birthday, and has been significantly upgraded, with a focus on enhancing ECCO’s user-friendliness as a teaching and student-learning resource, it seems an apt time to see what evidence there is for its use in teaching and student learning. Plus, with more of the students’ learning experiences moving online, to platforms such as Zoom for lectures, seminars and tutorials, and to online e-resources for primary and secondary source materials, what can be learned from past use of ECCO as a teaching tool, and how can this be applied in a remote learning environment?

Read more

New ECCO Experience and Advanced Search Updates Launching on December 18, 2020

ECCO Homepage

│By Megan Sullivan, Gale Primary Sources Product Manager│

We are thrilled to announce that on Friday, December 18, 2020, Gale will release an enhanced user experience for Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). On this date, we will retire the current version of ECCO, and your library’s ECCO links will seamlessly redirect to the new experience.

Read more