(Primarily impacting school librarians and teachers)

Introducing Gale K12 Ebooks

Gale Ebooks is a unique reference database that has access to 2^nd grade STEM project ideas books to college level texts. Unfortunately there are no methods for librarians to choose the titles to displayed on the virtual bookshelf based on the age of your students and patrons. Working with Gale, we have created an alternative bookshelf on Gale K12 Ebooks that does not contain the titles that are primarily for a college/adult audience. If you are using your TEL library location id, you are already seeing the titles on Gale K12 Ebooks. That applies to Gale Pages as well.

There are 59 schools that are still seeing the full Gale Ebooks because they’ve purchased additional titles from Gale (see attached spreadsheet). You can leave your bookshelf as is or you can contact me if you would like to also have titles listed below removed from your bookshelf.

On TEL, you will now see these two options listed under ALL RESOURCES:

I’m a school librarian and I have Gale Ebooks listed on my library website. What do I need to do?

Replace Gale Ebooks with Gale K12 Ebooks using the attached icon and the following url.

http://galesupport.com/telGeo/telGeoLink.php?loc=tel_k_tsla&db=GVRL

What titles are not listed on Gale K12 Ebooks?

Titles directed to a college audience have been removed from Gale K12 Ebooks. They are still accessible using Gale Ebooks on the TEL website.

eISBN	eBook Title
9780028659930	Americans at War 2005
9780028662121	Bioethics e4 2014
9780028659152	Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society 2004
9780684315713	Encyclopedia of Modern China 2009
9780028661957	Encyclopedia of Race and Racism e2 2013
9780028661155	Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender 2007
9780028660707	History of World Trade Since 1450 2006
9780028658834	International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family e2 2003
9781465431622	The Human Brain Book e2 2014

I’m teaching a course and need access to one of the titles that are no longer available on Gale K12 Ebooks, can I still access the title?

Yes, you will just need to access either through the TEL Gale Ebook database or directly using the links above to each title.

I don’t know what you mean when you say TEL Library Location ID URLs?

As you know, there are a few ways that you and your students can access TEL:

They can use the TEL website and TEL4U.org website.
You can list the TEL links to specific databases.
You can use the TEL Link Generator to create library specific URLs that will allow you to see usage and run reports for your library’s patrons.

Watch quick how-to video - https://share.vidyard.com/watch/gEFhPdfgkYkZQ2D96ay7oc?
Go to http://www.galesupport.com/telGeo/du.php and create your links.

Should I list both?

Probably not. Perhaps a public library would list Gale K12 Ebooks under Teen Resources and Gale Ebooks would be for general Research.

Why are you doing this?

In the last year, particularly in school libraries, there have been some questions about which TEL databases are available and appropriate for students. Upon close review of the titles contained in databases, some adjustments have been made to which databases are recommended for which grade levels.

For example, Academic OneFile and General OneFile had previous been recommended for Middle and High School resources but because they contain a number of mature titles that are geared toward an adult, general audience, we have removed those as recommendations for middle and high school. Compared to what we had over the last 21 years, TEL now has Gale in Context: Elementary, Middle School, High School, Opposing Viewpoints and High School Edition which are aligned to K12.

Also, the Gale in Context series now has a list of search terms that will not return results. If you have students looking for curse words or other identified “naughty” terms, they won’t receive any meaningful results in the K12 databases.

These changes are based on recommendations from Tennessee and other states. If you have younger students doing college level research which requires them to use Academic OneFile, providing access is up to the discretion of the librarian and school district. Since Gale Ebooks have materials spanning all grades, this technical solution has been provided.

If you want to learn more about Gale’s Curation Practices, read their statement at https://www.gale.com/curation-practices.

Please contact me if you have any questions!

Thanks,

Andrea

Andrea Zielke

TEL Administrator

Tennessee Electronic Library

Tennessee State Library and Archives

Office of Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett

403 7th Avenue North

Nashville, TN 37243

Phone: 615-532-4627

Fax: 615-532-9904

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