eRreviews: Gale NewsVault from Gale/Cengage Learning
By Cheryl LaGuardiaApr 15, 2011
GALE NEWSVAULT
Gale/Cengage Learning, http://gdc.gale.com/products/gale-newsvault
Content Gale NewsVault is Gale’s platform for cross-searching the range of its digital historical and newspaper collections, reaching back over 400 years. It allows users to search and browse simultaneously the following collections: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers; 19th Century British Library Newspapers, Parts I and II; 19th Century UK Periodicals, Series I: New Readerships; 19th Century UK Periodicals, Series II: Empire; 19th Century U.S. Newspapers; Economist Historical Archive 1843–2006 (coming in 2011); Financial Times Historical Archive 1888–2006; Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842–2003; Picture Post Historical Archive 1938–1957 (coming in 2011); Times Digital Archive 1785–1985; and the Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive 1902–2005. The sum of these collections is presently more than 2090 titles and ten million digitized facsimile pages, and all future historical newspaper and periodical archives will be added to it automatically.
Usability The home page of NewsVault is clean and clear: at top there’s a toolbar with buttons for Home, Advanced Search, Publications List, Browse By Location, and Help. Below that at screen left is a Welcome with an outline of what you can do in the file (i.e., Save, Bookmark, and Print results); at screen right is a window containing a simple search box that lets you choose a tab to search by Keyword, Entire Document, or Date. Underneath is a link to Advanced Search. Below that search box is the list of collections to which you have access (I was given access to the entire Vault), with checkboxes that let you limit searches by collection.
I checked the Publications List first to see what I could find. Items ranged from a November 4, 1622, pamphlet titled, “4 of November the Peach of France,” to the Yorkshire Freeholder from January 20, 1780, to March 28, 1780. When I Browsed By Location, I got a list of countries (Australia, Barbados, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, United States, and Wales) from which I was asked to select a city, and from there, locate individual publications.
When I selected Italy, the only city listed was Naples, and there I found the full-text image of the October 19, 1770, issue of the weekly Gazzetta di Napoli Foglio Straorinario. A quick check of all countries revealed the best coverage here is for England and the United States. Note: country listings expand and collapse via “+” and “–” boxes. Once I expanded a country listing to see all the cities, I could not collapse the list again—I had to go back and reenter the Browse By Country listing.
By the way, once I’d looked around the file, I found a new button in the top toolbar: Search History (self-explanatory, but I liked that it only displayed when there is one to see).
I did a simple Keyword search for “benjamin franklin” and turned up 497 items. The first was a poem from the Thursday, November 24, 1785, issue of the Times, “On the Return of Dr. Benjamin Franklin To America.” I had three options for displaying it: Article (zooms right to the specific item), View Page (shows the entire page an item is on), and Browse Issue (displays the entire documents in an easy-reading size). The quality of the image, for a 1785 newspaper, was remarkably good.
My next search, for “madeleine smith,” returned 80 items. Looking through them, I saw, displayed at page left, below refining the search options, a breakdown of the publications in which results occurred, ranging from the Glasgow Herald (13 articles) to the Times (ten articles), the New York Herald (three) and the July 27, 1857, Bangor Daily Whig & Courier (Bangor, Maine): “The great sensation among our English cousins, just now, is the trial of Madeleine Smith, at Glasgow.” The text was easy to read in all the facsimiles.
A search for “lillie langtry” revealed another nice feature in Vault: the type of article (Letter to the editor, News, Classified Advertising) is identified and displayed to the right in the record for each result.
Advanced Search lets you limit your searches to Advertising; Arts, Sports, and Leisure; Business; Editorial and Commentary; News; and People, as well as by Publication Title and Place of Publication. Adjacent Browse links make it easy to select from a list.
Powerful but not overly complex, the overall platform design is good. Researchers will discover sophisticated searching and display features not long after logging in. That I was able to cross-search so many collections and titles fast and easily reveals just how well this interface has been designed.
One drawback: I was viewing results on a 17-inch screen, and several times the right-hand elevator buttons were confusing to work. Given the newspaper layout for many of the publications in these collections, it can take a little time to maneuver through pages.
Pricing The NewsVault platform itself is free if you own any of the Gale products it indexes. All collections in the NewsVault platform are available as onetime purchases, with pricing dependent on size and type of institution. Individual collections range from $10,000 to $70,000, depending on the collection and, again, the size and type of institution.
Bottom Line This hits all the points: ten out of ten. Recommended for use in academic, public, and special libraries serving a wide range of historical researchers. Both scholars and schoolchildren will get good use out of this file. For a free trial, go to www.galetrials.com/GDCTrial.aspx.
| Author Information |
| Cheryl LaGuardia is the Research Librarian for the Widener Library at Harvard University and author of Becoming a Library Teacher (Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers and producers can contact her at claguard@fas.harvard.edu |
