Gale to Unify the Humanities Through Artemis
FARMINGTON HILLS -- Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, announced plans to unify, over the coming years, its extensive digital humanities collections on one state-of-the-art platform, creating the world's largest online curated primary source and literary collection.
The new research experience, Artemis, named for the Greek goddess who symbolizes new ideas, discovery, power and "the hunt," will enable researchers to make connections and realize relationships among content that has never before been possible.
"Artemis represents a significant investment in our products and new technology. No other publisher offers this combination of rich full-text content, metadata, and intuitive subject indexing – all enhanced by revolutionary work-flow and analytical technology that breathes new life into the study of the humanities," said Frank Menchaca, executive vice president, research solutions, Cengage Learning. "We are creating the most valuable curated digital humanities collection in the world through this integrated research environment."
Artemis offers users the ability to search across both primary and secondary materials as well as different subjects and genres. It also adds term clusters and term-graphing tools to allow users to conduct new kinds of analysis on familiar content sets, thematic subject indexing to aid in content discovery, and interface updates that conform to today's design standards, including sharing and collaboration tools. Overall, Artemis will transform the way students and researchers explore material, giving them the ability to challenge assumptions and create new theories and academic debate.
By being able to search across all collections, students can explore artifacts that had previously been worlds apart in the great digital divide. For example, a student seeking information on dramatic works performed in nineteenth century London, through separate searches, would be able to find: curated critical commentary from Gale's Drama Criticism series, actor biographies from Literature Resource Center; copies of theatrical reviews from The Times Digital Archive, and original copies of musical scores from Nineteenth Century Collections Online. However, they would likely miss the theatrical reviews in The Financial Times Historical Archive or the play advertisements in 19th Century U.S. Newspapers as they wouldn't likely consider searching those resources.
"The research process itself is complicated for students even without having to evaluate sources to determine their relevancy for finding information appropriate for completing an assignment or writing a solid research paper," said Angela Courtney, an associate librarian at Indiana University, who was consulted on the planning for Artemis. "By offering students the ability to access a variety of information in one location, and giving them advanced tools to better explore that information, research can become less daunting and more exciting, and can hopefully lead to new ideas and discoveries."
Artemis will release in a series of phases and will expand over the next few years. Gale will start by migrating Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online onto one platform. Separately but simultaneously, Gale will integrate its literature resources and Literature Criticism Online into a single research environment. Most of Gale's literature collections and additional Gale Digital Collections will eventually be added to their respective platforms. From there, Gale will work to unite these two into one comprehensive research experience.
For more information on Artemis, visit www.gale.cengage.com or stop by the Cengage Learning booth (701) at the Association of College and Research Libraries meeting in Indianapolis, April 10-12. For questions, please contact Kristina Massari at kristina.massari@cengage.com.
