Learning Resources

Gale Expands Online Archives

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 03/16/16

Gale is expanding and rebranding its digital archive program, Gale Primary Sources, in an effort to better meet the needs of digital humanities and text and data mining.

"The Gale Primary Sources program will be publishing 35 new products this year which cover more than 500 years of history," according to a news release. "Through its nearly 100 content partners, Gale is opening up 15 millions of pages of rare content from different parts of the world to researchers and digital humanists."

New collections coming this year include:

• Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity, A program that aims to bring together sources on gender, sexuality and identity;
• Early Arabic Printed Books, a text-searchable archive of Arabic books from before the 20th century; and
• American Fiction, 1774-1920, which includes thousands of works not previously available online.

The archives will also feature textual analysis tools for researchers without programming experience or digital humanities resources available.

"'Term cluster' and 'term frequency' tools will sort through the text and index terms from the content, generating visual displays of information to help researchers easily identify relationships between words and phrases," according to a news release. "Content from Gale Primary Sources archives are also available to current customers for text and data-mining purposes, and the company is exploring new data delivery models to better support digital humanities."

"Our multicultural digital archive program is really unprecedented in scale and scope — from the amount of resources we're developing to the signing of new content partners from different parts of the world, as well as the diversity of the rare and unique content we're digitizing," said Paul Gazzolo, senior vice president and general manager for Gale, in a prepared statement. "This material — much of which has never been made available for research use — coupled with our technology and unique digital tools is helping scholars map the story of humankind."