Gale Group Launches History Resource Center

Posted on June 6, 2000

Gale Group, an operating unit of the Thomson Corporation, has launched the History Resource Center:US. The subscription service, designed primarily for libraries, schools and universities, integrates historical documents, classic references, scholarly journals and newspapers and magazine articles within a single interface.

Gale plans to celebrate the launch of the product at the American Library Association's upcoming annual conference in Chicago, with a luncheon featuring guest speaker documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns' documentaries, including the Emmy-award winning Baseball and Civil War, are credited with breathing new life into PBS' programming.

``This is an unparalleled use of the Web and will likely change the way students study history,'' said John Barnes, senior vice-president and general manager of Gale Group's public and academic library market group. ``The combination of content is vast, completely unique and organized intelligently. With History Resource Center, a student can read about the most important scholarly work on, say, the American Civil War, put it in context with analysis from newspaper, journal or magazine articles, then, look at an original letter from a soldier in the field without ever leaving the dorm. No other product has ever offered such depth and breadth of information in one spot before.''

History Resource Center includes a large volume of historical material, such as the Dictionary of American History, thousands of current and archived newspaper and magazine articles, encyclopedia articles, biographies, rare documents that are digitized to be viewed on a desktop, multimedia maps and images, as well as descriptive chronologies. Gale leverages History Resource Center's Web environment with the creation of the ``Digital Forum,'' which allows students to share thoughts and opinions on various events in history.

Content in the History Resource Center is bolstered by several history-related publishing partnerships. Notable among them is a deal Gale signed with reference publisher ABC-CLIO, which allows History Resource Center users to search through several ABC-CLIO history databases simultaneously, and another with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which makes journals from this respected publisher's Arts and Humanities Index accessible through History Resource Center.