Gale Is Listening!

Company is poised to release new platform and products based on user feedback

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 6/15/2007

Like many of the large companies operating in the library market, Thomson Gale is emerging from its recent purchase, by private equity investors Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, with its immediate plans intact. Shortly after the acquisition, Thomson Gale’s Jay Flynn, VP and publisher, and Nader Qaimari, senior director, paid a visit to LJ’s Manhattan digs. Although unable to shed any significant light on what direction the new owners may take the firm—other than the likelihood of losing the Thomson part of the name—the two said the business plan is essentially to make the last two years’ investment in R&D pay off.

The men brought word of a new platform and publishing endeavors that will lead the company into different areas of information, including travel (adding the full run of Fodor’s books to InfoTrac) and pet health, as well as boosting databases with multimedia content. Flynn contends that there is a “tremendous amount of value yet to be added to all reference products,” and Gale is hot on it.

Qaimari told LJ that a federated searching feature is being added to PowerSearch, which will allow users to cross-search outside Gale databases. Gale is licensing Groxis’s visual search service Grokker, which also will search text in a library’s other subscription databases. This and other changes were the result of numerous conversations and 1000 hours of videotaped interviews with not just academic faculty and librarians of every ilk but users as well—an important focus. Flynn said the company monitors the “day in the life of” customers, studying their habits, the steps they take to acquire information, their “pain points” for getting info, and “how they fail, and what they look like when doing it.” Though almost all library vendors have librarian advisory boards, not everyone digs down to study the behaviors of end users. Librarians are expert searchers and adapt quickly to new tools, but students and others who rely on Google and wikis aren’t as savvy, so approaching them directly provides an entirely different perspective on usability.

The goal, Flynn said, is to find Gale’s “place in the workflow, to understand why [users] did X, learn from it, and formulate a product strategy based on that.” Gale is also looking at changing the way it markets itself. Using tech tools, Flynn theorized, is “all about convenience...[a company’s services] have to be the most convenient.”

Flynn and Qaimari also sneak-peeked Syllabus Builder, which will be announced at the upcoming American Library Association annual conference in Washington, DC. Designed for academics, the product provides a stable link to any spot in an electronic-based curriculum, allowing professors and students to save content and “build an anthology on the fly.”

Also look for Access My Library, which makes content from InfoTrac available to Google and other search engines for inclusion in search results. A simple click will discern whether the searcher’s library has access to the information and open it if so. The product is being beta tested throughout Connecticut libraries, with Florida, New Mexico, and California on deck. Access My Library will be enhanced with a “full collection of ebooks by year’s end,” Qaimari said. Flynn added that Gale has partnered with OCLC and is trying to lure other top content providers including EBSCO to join suit. “We want to get as many vendors on it as possible,” Flynn said.

Also forthcoming is a revamped Literature Resource Center, harnessing Gale’s impressive array of literary reference resources, which Flynn promises is the company’s springboard into relaunching its literature program.