Corner Office: Gale’s Sommers & Barnes

With this issue, LJ debuts a new feature: Corner Office. In it we talk to the leaders of companies that operate in the library field, develop products and services that libraries purchase, and interact with or impact libraries. Librarians have a love/hate relationship with vendors. We often help them to develop and test products and sit on their advisory boards. We also critique those products and challenge everything from content, pricing, and platforms to delivery and distribution.

Nevertheless, librarians have a vested interest in vendors’ continued development of products and services and support of those we’ve purchased. Vendors also have a vested interest here, in library funding, which fuels purchases. They help promote libraries both via marketing and in support of library legislation.

From where vendors sit, they can give us a bird’s-eye view of the library world. What do they see as the future? How is the present shaking out? In their conversations with customers, what are they hearing? What products can we expect and how will they fit into our libraries? How can they help us deliver improved services and market the library better?

The Corner Office opens with an interview with Patrick Sommers, president of reference/information publisher Gale (part of Cengage Learning). Sommers took the helm in October 2007, after running system vendor Sirsi beginning in 2001 and engineering both the 2005 merger with Dynix and the 2007 sale of the newly created SirsiDynix to Vista Equity Partners. Those moves are still reverberating in the library community. Joining Sommers is John Barnes, who heads strategic marketing and business development.

Gale itself is owned currently by private equity firms Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, which appear to be investing in new platforms and products. Sommers’s move to Gale from Sirsi is a better fit than we might have expected. “I spent most of my career on the information side of the industry, with Dun & Bradstreet [1969–90], and more recently with Dialog, before I sold the company to Thomson,” he reminds us. (Thomson recently sold Dialog to ProQuest.) His stint at Sirsi gives him understanding, he says, “of the challenges libraries face in software.”

LJ: Gale has a wealth of journals and legacy reference books plus databases. How is it all fitting together now?

Sommers: I think the vision is, “How can we make this information more discoverable, more usable.” We face the same challenges libraries face, whether academic or public, that people today don’t start their searches for information through the library. It’s in all of our interests to drive people to access library resources. Now they’re not easy to find, and once you find them, they’re not necessarily easy to use.

They don’t meet some of the standards that people expect from the Internet. Authentication is a hindrance and a barrier. Resources are buried deep in a library’s web pages. Even more important, people seeking information are challenged with having to go to multiple places to find it. And even if they do find quality databases from Gale, if they want to search a library’s collection, they have to go to another interface. If they want to search the Internet, they have to go there. And if they want to search for information within the community, they have to go to other sources.

The problem with that is most people just cop out and use the Internet. In today’s world, there’s no reason why people can’t start with one location and search all of those at one time.

How would that work?

Sommers: Some people are still going to want to go after a piece of information from a reference source, and, in that case, a tool like PowerSearch will allow a very quick look at all the available resources and bring back that piece of information.

We have a product called Health and Wellness [Resource Center] that’s in over 1000 libraries. [It includes] the collections Gale has published over the years in the area of health. When you search it now, you’re just reaching Gale resources. We’ve enhanced the interface, we’ve enhanced the tools. We’ve brought more multimedia into it, we’ve made it look a lot more engaging. But the next version will allow the user in one portal to search not only Gale resources but the library’s collection and local community resources.

So if I have a concern about an autistic child...Gale has a lot of rich information. The library may have information it has purchased. But at the same time, wouldn’t I want to see what was available within the community? Maybe the hospital has a program for parents, maybe the local government has support services for parents. There are authoritative web sites on health, too. The idea would be to go to that one portal.

Are you vetting that information?

Sommers: We would crawl and index the same way an Internet crawler works and index local web resources. We would identify high-quality resources that the library would vet...that’s the value the library brings. It’s saying why not search WebMD, why not search the New England Journal of Medicine, whatever resources are out there. And if the library chooses, there’s no reason we couldn’t shoot off a Google search and bring back results from that.

For a number of years we’ve been trying to help bring people back to the library, with [Gale’s] AccessMyLibrary product. That’s one approach. The other approach would be to push information outward. If you’re looking for information about health careers, job training, whatever the topic might be, the library has portals that will provide you with a comprehensive view—not just from the Internet but from the library and databases and the community.

Isn’t that what libraries are trying to do right now?

Sommers: Electronic usage for libraries is [still] extremely low compared with what it could be. If the studies [referring to OCLC’s 2005 Perceptions of Libraries… report] are right, and people begin their search two percent of the time at the library, what if...they had the ease of use of Google with the quality and depth of multiple resources on that particular topic?

Barnes: We’re talking about a new generation of products that don’t look like databases. They look like what you could see in a web experience, with some search capability but [with] a browse [function]. It’s more serendipitous. The product will be able to interact with content like reviews and create lists, share those lists, and mark them with del.icio.us.

How do you get the word out? That’s always been a problem.

Barnes: It’s a problem that has to be addressed at multiple levels. We’ve long supported libraries with marketing materials, and that has some impact, but you have to go where the users are. We can’t expect them to go to the databases. They’re starting in Google, so we have to get them in Google.

We do that now with AccessMyLibrary. It’s just one subset of our content. We see tying [our products] to AccessMyLibrary as a portal through which you can get any resources. It doesn’t mean we’re going to provide all our information free. It’s like advertising. You need to make it out there where people can see it.

Sommers: If you make the better answers just as easy as the quick ones, people will use them. It’s not simple. We can work with libraries in training and communication, and if we build the products right, I think we can accomplish this. If we’re successful, word of mouth is still a powerful thing.

Where is the growth for you? With so many overlapping products, how long can libraries afford to buy similar ones?

Sommers: To some degree, it’s about price and tonnage. You don’t buy a book because of how much it weighs. Libraries pay more money for best sellers than for a third-tier book. If we can drive more people to use library resources...that’s where we’re going to make a lot of investment in terms of publishing electronically first.

Think of Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia [in Gale Virtual Reference Library]. It’s very renowned, but it’s static. We publish [it] in eight-year cycles. It’s expensive. In today’s world, it has limited use. Imagine if it’s dynamic. If a new species is found, it’s included; if a species becomes endangered, it’s updated. We have an incredible publishing capacity [at Gale]. We’re introducing a new product called Global Issues in Context. There is no [Gale] print equivalent. This is going to be all electronic, [with] feeds from newspapers all over the world, getting different perspectives, not just the United States. The use of these type of products will be much, much broader than a book stuck behind a reference desk.

Barnes: One of the issues [for librarians] today is, with limited budgets, how do you make choices? [It’s] not who has more of this or that but who has products that better engage users. And that’s thinking about it from the user’s perspective.

Sommers: I can’t expect to keep increasing price on something that’s not being used even if my costs go up every year. We’ve got a lot of room to drive up value based on how many people use electronic resources today. I think we’re very open to working with other publishers, because you don’t need three health resource databases in the library. Why not have one portal? We’ve done that with the Gale Virtual Reference Library. We’ve worked with a lot of different publishers. That’s a good model.

What are you keeping your eye on outside the library world?

Barnes: We’ve all seen the web as a threat at various times. There’s so much great social networking being developed. That’s all the stuff that should be in a library product.

Sommers: We have to allow libraries to push themselves out into the community where people live and play. In an e-world, there are no bricks-and-mortar limits.