Too bad Gale didn’t announce this on the first day of CIL rather than the last. Better late than never, however.
Cengage Gale and Portico, (part of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA) announced that Gale will be preserving three additional digital historical collections with Portico: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Something About the Author Online and Literature Criticism Online. Gale had previously added ten other Gale Digital Collections to Portico—including 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, The Making of Modern Law: Primary Resources and Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale’s contributions representsover 80 million files (75 million pages of content), which doubled the size of the Portico archive in just one year.
Two CIL exhibitors are offering “freebies” for National Library Week: Gale and ProQuest. Gale’s focus this year is advocacy. After you download a widget, you can search Career Transitions, Global Issues in Context, GREENR, and Grzimek’s Animal Life. ProQuest will provide free access to six databases: PQ African American Heritage, PQ Historical Newspapers, cultureGrams, eLibrary, SIRS Discoverer, and SIRS Issues Researcher.
Other companies are also observing National Library Week, although not by exhibiting at CIL (And Why Not??). ABC-CLIO offers free access to all its databases in what it’s calling a Virtual Open House. Alexander St. Press will provide free access to American History in Video until April 30, 2010. Sage is extending its free access to its journals until May 15th!
If you’re at CIL, go see Gale and ProQuest in the exhibit hall. If not, visit all of these online and tell them the CIL bloggers pointed you towards these special offers. Oh, and take a look at this week’s Newsweek (on newstands April 12th) for Gale’s full page ad celebrating libraries. Very cool.
At this morning’s LexisNexis Customer Appreciation breakfast, I was very impressed by one of the award winners. Daniel Cornwall , Alaska State Library, won the GODORT “Documents to the People” Award. He gets a plaque and $3,000. The money is going to fund a Civics Library that the Alaska State Library plans to put on flash drives and distribute to schools. He keeps the plaque.
The other announcement that surprised me was learning that Tim Fusco left LexisNexis last week. He had been VP, Publishing Operations. He’s now joined Gale, a Cengage Company, as VP, Sales Academic Market.
To get from here to there at ALA it’s best to take the shuttle buses
Ah, Chicago. Hog butcher, etc., etc. When I arrived yesterday afternoon I took a quick walk through The Loop, Chicago’s historic downtown district. I even stepped into the old Marshall Fields department store, which reminded me a lot of the old John Wanamaker department store in my hometown of Philadelphia. Both from the same era. Both now owned by Macy’s. We live in a world where things seem destined to consolidate. And expand in the process.
It’s true in the information industry, too. Coming out on the plane yesterday–we actually took off early from Philly and arrived early at O’Hare!–I was catching up on the last couple of days of newspapers, devouring reports about Google’s foray into the operating systems space, with a free open source platform potentially challenging MS-Windows.
At SLA a couple of weeks ago, the ITI blog team was invited to a private breakfast with ProQuest, where we were briefed on developments related to Proquest, Dialog, CSA, and Serials Solutions–now all operating under the ProQuest name. At ALA, we’ve been invited to another (this time public) breakfast where ProQuest is going to announce its platform integration strategy. It used to be you could pigeon hole the vendors into a single category of service offerings, but more and more they are–how to say this?–becoming more and more.
Later today, I’ll be interviewing Jay Jordan, President OCLC, about recent announcements coming out of Columbus (OH), about OCLC’s ambitions to expand its offerings to what it describes as a “web scale coperative library management” system, which sounds to me as if the world’s largest cataloger wants to be an ILS vendor, too. More on that later today.
Meanwhile, it’s drizzling in Chicago, so if I were you, I’d take the shuttle bus, operated as always by Gale, now owned by Cengage Learning, down to McCormick Place.
