The Charleston Advisor / July 2013
www.charlestonco.com 51 Advisor Interview
An Interview with Jim Draper, Vice President and
General Manager, Gale, Part of Cengage Learning
doi:10.5260/chara.15.1.51
By Dennis Brunning (TCA Contributing Editor, Arizona State University)
<[email protected]>
We’ll throw you an easy one to start off. Tell us who you are and
what you do. Feel free to dabble a little in your great history—the
merger of Gale Reference and IAC (Information Access Corporation). We’ll call this question “what’s in a name.”
of content and software integration. It is loaded with tools and services that would have been unimaginable back when we got started
in the “Internet” business. I’ll have more to say about Artemis in a
moment.
Thanks for the easy one—always appreciated.
Along the way we’ve developed expertise in a number of new areas.
Today, through our Gale Digital Collections program, we’re continuing to broaden the types of content we publish and how we publish
that content. For example, we are very active in the areas of manuscripts, photography, and ephemera—as well as books, journals,
and newspapers. We’re also beginning to explore the role of threedimensional objects in the research experience, as well as the role of
sound (music, voice, and similar). How we publish that content and
the software we develop is also a large part of creating an engaging
customer experience and, ultimately, genuine value for the researcher.
Utilizing advanced methodologies such as the agile software development practice, which calls for a collaborative approach to product development and incorporates a constant loop of user-testing and feedback, our development team is able to create sophisticated, tool-rich
research platforms that fit into the workflows of our customers and
aid in new research discoveries.
I am Jim Draper, VP and General Manager at Gale. I manage the Gale
business for Cengage Learning. I’ve been at Gale for over 25 years.
I was hired as an assistant editor in 1985, which means I was given a
manual typewriter, a bottle of white-out, and instructions on how to
use a photocopy machine. I was hired to write literary criticism to support Gale’s enormous program in Literature Resources. After a couple
of years, I was bumped up to an IBM Selectric Typewriter. (This was
a welcome indicator that I was going to be “kept on” at the company.)
The Selectric is still one of my favorite editorial machines.
This is a quick way of saying I’ve been in the trenches for a long time,
watching the industry reshape itself and sometimes, I like to think,
helping to move it forward.
Gale is now the world’s leading publisher of research and reference
resources for libraries, schools, and businesses. We serve the world’s
information and education needs through our vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools, and on the Internet.
Our strategy is to transform the library and research business by unlocking access to rare artefacts and providing a source of content never before available, while also clearly distinguishing ourselves from
our competitors. Gale has come a long way since its first reference
publication, the Encyclopedia of Associations, was published in 1954.
Mergers and acquisitions throughout the years have brought us leading information technology, periodical databases and a worldwide
source of rare primary documents.
One of these mergers was indeed of Gale Reference and IAC. That
happened in the late 1990s, right at the beginning of the “Internet”
age for reference materials. The vision at the time was to combine
journal articles, reference materials, and news into a seamless experience, and to bundle the various content-sets into subject-based collections. We started with Literature Resource Center in 1999. When we
launched the product, it contained eight journals; about 100 images;
and 10,000 (or thereabouts) “literature criticism” essays. People were
amazed: “How did you fit all of that into one place?” they asked. Well
today, we have hundreds and hundreds of full-text journals containing over 1.5 million articles; hundreds of thousands of literature-criticism essays; hundreds of thousands of biographies; huge collections
of images and interview transcripts, and lots more. So it’s been quite
an adventure. Now the challenge is to make all of our products work
more efficiently and map very directly to user needs, outcomes, and
workflows.
We’re getting better and better at it all the time, and our Artemis environment—launching in June 2013—is the next big leap in terms
While Gale Digital Collections is an important part of the Gale portfolio, we also continue to manage an extensive reference and research
program for K-12 schools, universities, and public libraries. We publish leading databases on topics such as biography, science, and history, and we maintain the largest online reference library: Gale Virtual
Reference Library (GVRL). In addition, we’re continuing to publish new print and e-reference titles under our venerable imprints—
Charles Scribner’s Sons, Macmillan Reference USA, and St. James
Press—on topics such as the intersection of literature and war, a new
title from our Literature of Society series.
We listen closely to the needs of our customers and our end users, and
our goal is to continue to find ways to bring the unique content and
rare artefacts they need and want into the research space. To achieve
this, we’ve established many partnerships with leading institutions
throughout the years. In fact, our longest relationship has been with
the British Library (for approximately the past 30 years, beginning as
a microfilm partner), and we have other longstanding relationships
with The National Archives (UK), The U.S. National Archives, The
Library of Congress and others. Most recently, we announced partnerships with the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Associated Press. Altogether, we have about 400 institutions currently supplying content to our Gale Digital Collections
products. Aligning ourselves with leading cultural institutions ensures
we’re able to deliver the most sought-after content for our customers.
More information on our work can be found here in the series of videos we’ve created titled “Behind the Screens” about Gale’s work to
digitize history <http://gdc.gale.com/videos/>.
In addition, being part of Cengage Learning, one of the largest higher
education publishers, Gale is in a very unique position compared to
other vendors. We have access to academic channels and expertise
52 Advisor Interviews / The Charleston Advisor / July 2013
that none of our competitors have. We are one of the only organizations that can build resources that truly bridge from the library to the
classroom.
The hard question: You announced through various channels that
Cengage is restructuring. Tell us more and especially for those of us
who remember Rowe.com and other industry faux pas.
As we noted in the press release regarding our third quarter fiscal
2013 results, Cengage Learning has retained restructuring, financial,
and legal advisors to assist in developing and analyzing a range of
potential restructuring options to strengthen the Company’s balance
sheet and position it for long-term growth and success. The Company
is preparing to engage in discussions with its major financial stakeholders about the terms of a comprehensive restructuring transaction.
Among the options the Company is evaluating is the implementation
of a restructuring through a Chapter 11 filing. The Chapter 11 process can be an effective way of achieving a fast and efficient debt
restructuring with minimal disruption to the business. This does not
mean Cengage Learning is going out of business. On the contrary,
we expect to continue operating as usual throughout this process, and
will continue to meet our customer commitments. The options we are
reviewing to strengthen our financial condition are intended to make
sure we have the financial strength and flexibility to support the transformation of our business and continue delivering innovative customer offerings for many years to come.
We’re confident that whatever path we take with respect to our capital
structure, it will not impact the quality and reliability of our product
offerings and our high level of service.
Some criticize Cengage for repackaging reference content that is
similar to freely available information on the Web. For example,
some Gale content shows up in Answers.com. What is this all about
and how are your products better than what we can get from a
Google search?
Gale works with many different content partners to create research
resources for our customers, including publicly available content. Aggregating this content from disparate sources and integrating it with
our proprietary, vetted material and our advanced research tools creates a completely unique research experience. Researchers can interact with the content in new ways, and make new discoveries much
faster than can be done with a simple Google search (if at all).
For researchers who need to “see everything” before they draw their
conclusions, Gale provides a solid experience. Imagine not having a
service that shows the big picture but rather just snippets of a small
one. First, you’d need to go all over the place to see the entire picture,
and who has the time? That’s simply not acceptable. Moreover, serious researchers would say no to such an incomplete service since the
underlying conclusions they would reach—based as they would be on
a truncated content set—would be indefensible.
Sometimes we do license certain elements of the content we produce
to various Web services. Usually the content is modified in some
manner to fit the needs of those services, so it doesn’t always mirror
the “original” Gale content in every respect. That said, we’re comfortable with limited re-distribution of our content within the services of
others since it broadens our distribution and helps carry forward our
mission to reach as many people as we possibly can.
Of course, content in such services does not usually have the same
packaging that Gale gives it, so end-users may notice significant differences in tools, services, and even in look-and-feel.
www.charlestonco.com
Most of our content, however, is not redistributed in this manner and
is generally only available through us, which means that the vast majority of our content isn’t available on Google or on any other Web
search engine. Though I should add that metadata for some of these
content sets is available on the open Web as a finding aid for end-users who start their searches on Web services, and often the metadata
allows seamless linking into Gale products where the end-user has
such rights.
Our products are better than what you can get from a Google search
because Gale continues to be unique in the resources and experience
it brings to the development of an extremely broad information portfolio. For example, over the past two years, Gale has worked with
over 5,000 scholars and academics as authors of content published
by Gale—generally in the monograph and multivolume reference
works we publish under our various scholarly and general-reference
imprints. This is also true for the original content in our InContext
databases and in the supplementary essays in Gale Digital Collections—the content is fresh, unique, purpose-built, and purpose-written. We’re really proud of this commitment to high-end authorship,
since it means Gale products are cutting-edge; authoritative; and bear
the imprimatur of experts in their fields.
In content that you aggregate, how can you keep prices as low as
your competitors especially when they are buying up some of the
content your customers would expect from an aggregator. This appears to force you to become a customer of your competition. If this
is true, what is your plan? If not, set us straight.
The only content we aggregate is on the journals side of our business.
A very solid proportion of this material is unique to Gale, meaning it
is not included in the collections of other publishers who aggregate
journals. Where we do aggregate the same journal content as others,
we add value through both presentation and through Search, the latter driven by some terrific metadata and indexing. Because we also
distribute large parts of our journal aggregations as components of
discipline-specific “resource centers” (which contain reference materials; unique essays; videos; image galleries; primary sources; etc.),
we can spread the cost of journal aggregation a bit more widely than
otherwise.
The Charleston Advisor awarded Opposing Viewpoints in Context
with the “Most Improved Product Award” a few years back. Anything in the pipeline that you are excited about and know that we
will share this energy?
We’ve been working on a number of product lines and developments
that we and our customers are really excited about. We are continuing
to develop our National Geographic Virtual Library (NGVL) line of
products, starting with the National Geographic Magazine Archive,
1888-1994 and 1995-Current, as well as National Geographic: People, Animals, and the World and most recently National Geographic
Kids.
We also launched Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), a
groundbreaking multiyear global digitization and publishing program
that brings together rare primary source materials from the nineteenth
century and beyond. NCCO is the most ambitious scholarly digitization and publication program we’ve ever undertaken and has already been met with great interest worldwide. Nearly 160 institutions
around the globe have already purchased access to the archives, with
more coming on board with us every week—even every day.
We also just announced the first product in our line of Gale-Smithsonian resources being developed from Smithsonian assets as a result
The Charleston Advisor / July 2013
www.charlestonco.com 53 About Jim Draper
Jim Draper is Vice President and General Manager at Gale, part of Cengage Learning. During his
tenure at Gale, he has led the creation of several publications including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, British Newspapers: 1600-1900, 19th-Century
U.S. Newspapers, British Literary Manuscripts Online, and Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Trans-national Archive . He launched Gale’s Literature Resource Center—the foundation product in Gale’s
highly successful “Resource Center” line—and led efforts to migrate Gale’s print-based Literature
program to 100% digital distribution.
ing platform or products/services that could work with such
providers?
Cengage Learning offers its own
learning platform, MindTap.
MindTap is a program of digital products and services that
engages students through interactivity and offers instructors
choice in content, platforms, deMr. Draper is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a post-graduate degree in medieval lanvices and learning tools. Beyond
guages from Oxford University. He is also a graduate of the Columbia University Rare Books School
an eBook, course delivery platand the Denver Publishing Institute. He has been in the publishing industry for nearly 30 years, as
form or Learning Management
author, editor, online developer, print publisher, digital publisher, academic publisher, business-deSystem, MindTap is the first in a
velopment director, and rights director. He is currently active in scholarly and bibliographical societnew category of Personal Learnies around the world. n
ing Experiences. The MindTap
platform enables professors and
students to personalize the learning experience—by bringing in multimedia content, study tools,
of our partnership. Air & Space and Smithsonian Magazine Archive
text-to-speech functionality, and much more via MindApps—to creincludes the complete back files of both magazines as well as Gale’s
ate a more engaging learning environment. MindTap is cloud-based
advanced research tools, and will support cross-curricular and interand device agnostic, giving students access to their course materidisciplinary studies in schools and in academic spaces.
als anytime, anywhere—on their desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile
The glue that will eventually bring all of these resources together is
phones.
our new state-of-the-art Artemis platform. Artemis, named for the
In addition, MindTap also allows content and services from other
Greek goddess who symbolizes new ideas, discovery, power, and
vendors to be incorporated into the learning experience. We have a
“the hunt,” will unite Gale’s extensive primary source collections (i.e.
robust, formalized partnership program which we call the MindShare
ECCO, NCCO) and literary collections (i.e. Literature Criticism OnAlliance Partner Program. We developed the program to provide a
line, Litfinder, MLA International Biography) on one state-of-the-art
hub for encouraging growth and developing new partnerships which
platform. Artemis will unite nearly 130 million pages of content creultimately benefits our customers. We recognize that every compaating one of the largest curated digital humanities collections in the
ny offers different strengths (some are the best at Web-tutoring, or
world.
lecture capture, etc.) and there’s a need for educators to harness all
By being able to search across all collections, students can explore
of those services in one place. Specifically, when we launched the
artefacts that had previously been worlds apart in the great digital diMindTap platform, we had an influx of partners (Kaltura, NetTutor,
vide. For example, a student seeking information on dramatic works
WebAssign, etc.) developing MindApps, and they’ve reinforced the
performed in nineteenth century London, through separate searches,
vital importance of partnerships. We also have partnerships with all
would be able to find: curated critical commentary from Gale’s Draof the leading LMS providers, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodlema Criticism series, actor biographies from Literature Resource Cenrooms, Sakai, so that MindTap can be accessed seamlessly through
ter, copies of theatrical reviews from The Times Digital Archive, and
their services.
original copies of musical scores from Nineteenth Century CollecSome of us love your unique database RDS Reference Suite. Some
tions Online. However, they would likely miss the theatrical reviews
of us even know about its history. Does keeping its original search
in The Financial Times Historical Archive or the play advertisements
format hinder its popularity for discovery services or even your own
in 19th Century U.S. Newspapers. as they wouldn’t likely consider
search platforms?
searching those resources.
Do you have a discovery service? Do you work well with other discovery services that your customers may use?
Our focus at Gale is solely to secure the important content our customers want and create the best databases to bring that content life,
however we are committed to working with the various discovery
services that have emerged in the library environment. Many Gale
products are fully indexed with discovery services such as Summon
(Serials Solutions), Primo Central (Ex Libris), EDS (Ebsco Discovery Service), and Worldcat Local (OCLC). In fact, Gale recently announced expanded agreements with OCLC and EBSCO.
Our goal is to make Gale content discoverable to library end users regardless of where the student or patron begins their search.
Many universities are outsourcing their online only programs to
third party products like Pearson Learning. Presumably, among
many benefits, such outsourcing simplifies content requirements
(textbooks, course packs, etc). Does Cengage offer an online learn-
I helped build RDS so it’s close to my heart. Our objectives for RDS
are to ensure that the core content remains available and up to date,
and that the platform continues to make it possible to do the kinds of
searches our customers have told us again and again work very well
for them. We also continue to “edit” RDS in the sense that a selection
process informs the database (i.e., it’s not “everything” on the subject
but rather a filtered collection that is highly targeted). This saves time
for the user, which is of great value within the RDS community.
There is no issue with RDS and discovery services. They can generally handle the data as we present it to them. If for some reason they
cannot, we reformat it accordingly.
Do you have IOS and Android apps for your products? Can users
share through social media? Give us your vision and reality statement for the mobile and social media revolution.
Yes, we started offering free IOS applications to libraries starting
back in 2009 with the launch of AccessMyLibrary (AML). AML apps
54 Advisor Interviews / The Charleston Advisor / July 2013
www.charlestonco.com
are now available for public, school, academic, and special libraries
and for all IOS and Android devices. AML apps can be downloaded
for free and make a library’s Gale resources accessible to patrons on
the go. With AML apps, we are taking the library directly to users and
tens of thousands of patrons have already downloaded the app.
with administrative duties, we hope to positively influence student
engagement and outcomes. As institutions are held more accountable
for graduation rates and outcomes for funding, our support in driving
engagement and making a real impact will become more and more
important.
Through products such as Nineteenth Century Collections Online,
users do have the option of sharing their research (links) via social
media sites like Facebook. We also offer Zotero in NCCO and in Artemis, a popular and robust browser-based tool for collecting, citing,
and organizing research sources. We’ll continue to work with customers and explore the potential of collaborative tools in our resources.
Given findings such as those from the student engagement survey, as
well as what we have observed through our own research and experience in developing content and services, we as an organization have
chosen to focus on engagement. In fact, we believe in the power of
student engagement so much that we’ve created a conference on the
topic, Engage 2013, which was held this year in conjunction with the
SXSWedu conference. Engage 2013 was dedicated to the importance
of engaging learners to reach improved outcomes, as well as driving engagement through the technology of personal learning experiences. Speakers and sessions explored all aspects of engagement and
shared forward-thinking perspectives on the ever changing technological landscape.
We also spend quite a lot of time interacting with researchers, professors, and librarians via our own social media channels on Facebook
(<https://www.facebook.com/GaleCengage>) and Twitter (<https://
twitter.com/cengagegale>).
As the world and our customers become more mobile-engaged, we
are undertaking a significant effort to understand the needs, by community and user types, so we can build what is truly desired, not just a
simple “mobile” solution that is generic and potentially sub-standard.
As our customers are varied, their mobility needs are very different,
and we want to build accordingly. In addition, due to the nature of
the material we publish, viewability (of images in particular) is a key
consideration, so this, along with a strong search that doesn’t compromise the end-user experience in any way, will be a big focus for us.
In these tough economic times and technological disruption, let’s
close with your pitch on how to bring back old customers and get
some new. How do we engage or engage again with Cengage?
We also offer online resources to help engage with instructors and librarians. We recently launched a blog that is roughly 70% contributed by industry experts: our customers, partners, faculty, and authors.
Our goal is to create a network where industry experts can come and
learn about different teaching techniques and trends, and share their
stories. More than 12,000 people have already subscribed. We’ve also
just recently launched the Instructor Engagement Center with tools,
research, and information focused on engagement; resources include
white papers, case studies, success stories, infographics, videos, podcasts, you name it. It is an excellent source of engagement information for our customers and it is updated regularly.
As our name indicates, engagement is at the heart of what we do.
When people think of Cengage Learning, I hope they think of student engagement and superior service. There are so many factors that
can affect student outcomes but one area in which we really feel we
can make a difference is student engagement. The Community College Survey of Student Engagement reports that, the more actively
engaged students are—with faculty and staff, with other students, and
with the subject matter they study—the more likely they are to learn,
to stick with their studies, and to attain their academic goals. Students benefit from direct interaction with instructors and their own
peers, and by providing professors with resources that enable them
to spend more time interacting with students, and less time dealing
We hope to bring more students and researchers into Cengage Learning’s path and to do that we’ve made a strategic shift to incorporate
their needs directly into our Research and Development efforts. In the
twenty-first century, students have options when it comes to accessing information, whether it’s a Google search, Wikipedia, or a digital
library source. In certain cases, it is no longer necessary to buy a textbook to pass a class. Educational content providers must now focus
on student and researcher wants, needs, and pain points. Whether it be
our focus on varied user personas during the agile development process or the use of analytics from student interactions with our digital
products, the needs of our end users are more paramount than ever
and will continue to fuel our R&D initiatives. n