Though the Gale booth at Midwinter had all the trappings of the 21st century, their new products are going old school with a 19th-century focus. The Nineteenth Century Collection offers a broad look at everything from the 1800s, including newspapers, books, maps, and more. This period of history saw an incredible growth of publications as industrialized printing grew and international communications became more common. The collection will debut online a bit later this year, and will ramp up to full capacity throughout the summer.
Gale is also reaching back to the late 19th century to digitize and index 106 years of National Geographic Magazine from 1888 to 1994. This new archive will be fully searchable and, I was told, will include both full-text views and page scans presenting each article in context. Though not the first time this archive has been available digitally, the search indexing through Gale will be a bit easier for research than swapping out the CDs of past releases. This will also be a great product for school libraries looking for short-form nonfiction and primary source coverage of historical and scientific (geographic at least) topics.