Literary Database Looks Good, Works Well, Lacks Depth

Gale Literature Resource Center (LRC) is a comprehensive database that provides biographical information, literary criticism, literary analysis, and reviews for over 130,000 writers of all disciplines. An emphasis on eye-catching featured works and topics, along with portal pages that organize search results by category, make LRC a great resource for high school and undergraduate students who have minimal experience with library databases. The trade-off is that the content is not as deep as the more comprehensive MLA International Bibliography database, and the cost of a subscription may be a challenge for some libraries.

Product Overview/Description

LRC covers topics in English literature, world literature, American literature, literary criticism, literary theory, literary movements, and Shakespeare. Primarily intended for high school and undergraduate students, it was redesigned in 2023 to include more accessible browsing options.

This full-text database (no abstract- or index-only titles) contains over 2.6 million documents from more than 480 scholarly journals and literary magazines, including nearly 300,000 pieces of literary criticism, over 17,000 topic and work overviews, over 160,000 author biographies, over 90,000 original works of literature (poems, short stories, essays, etc.), and over 40,000 interviews.

The database also contains award-winning reference sources from Gale like Dictionary of Literary Biography, Literature Criticism, Contemporary Authors, and more—close to sixty reference sets in all. Not all of these reference works are included in full, mainly due to rights restrictions. Title lists for reference works and journals, which also include full-text and image start and end dates, whether titles are peer reviewed, descriptions of the reference sources, and other details, can be found here:

Journals and literary magazines: https://assets.gale.com/tlist/additional/litrc_jm.xlsx

Reference sources: https://assets.gale.com/tlist/additional/litrc_rt.xls

In 2019, Gale redesigned its platform to make it easier to use and to provide a unified experience across Gale products. This redesign was influenced by the results of surveys to nearly 2,000 U.S. students—high school through post-doctorate—and hundreds of library customers, paired with qualitative feedback from 100+ design assessments, focus groups, and individual interviews.

In 2023, Gale introduced a refreshed home page for LRC, with a monthly rotation of featured works and topics linked to portals that bring together supporting and related information. In 2024, they added native PDF access to original sources and, for 100 works, collections of primary and historical documents, curated by subject experts, that provide historical context.

User Experience

Although the standard one-box search function is front and center on the main page, users can also browse by (as of this writing) 170 “featured works” and 530 “featured topics” (Figure 1), which make it much easier for students to find the information they need. The featured works include classics like Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and Animal Farm along with a few contemporary titles (The Hate U Give, Purple Hibiscus, Persepolis, Mother Tongue, A Lesson Before Dying). The topic portals allow users to browse resources on themes like “feminism in children’s literature,” “travel writing in the nineteenth century,” and “mental illness in short fiction.” As of April 5, 2024, Gale is planning to add approximately 50 new portals, the details TBD.

Once you select a work or topic, you are taken to a page that provides an overview and shows additional resources.

For example, after selecting Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Figure 2), I see the start of a 5,272-word overview from the Gale series For Students Academic Collection and a link to read the overview in its entirety. On the right side of the screen, under “Related,” I see three additional relevant topics (American Women Social Activists, Nineteenth-Century: Emancipation; Slave Narratives, American; and Violence in Literature) and one additional work (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass).

I continue down the page to the “Primary Source & Historical Documents” section (Figure 3), which contains materials selected by an academic subject matter expert to inspire discussions and further research. Per Gale, these materials, which include a variety of images, audio and video clips, and texts, are “a mix of historical and more contemporary primary sources, skewing more toward historical but bringing in contemporary connections wherever possible” (Gale rep, personal communication, April 5, 2024). Such documents are currently available for 100 works, with future additions possible.

Next, I see relevant resources grouped by category: Literature Criticism, Biographies, Topic & Work Overviews, Reviews and News, Primary Sources and Literary Works, and Multimedia (see Figure 2). Readers may note the similarity of the label “Primary Sources & Literary Works” with “Primary Source & Historical Documents.” The former are drawn from the LRC database through preset searches, while the latter are curated by subject experts. Both may contain original works of literature—like poems and short stories—relating to a work, author, or topic, as well as documents like interviews (including audio interviews), literary essays, speeches, and conference notes.

The Literary Criticism category often shows articles from the 400+ journals included in LRC but may also retrieve entries from Gale’s literary reference sets. Once you select a grouping, e.g., Literary Criticism, you can further refine the results with filters (Figure 4).

The search box at the top of the main page is helpful if you want to look up specific authors, works, or topics not featured in the browsable headings (Figure 5). Search results are grouped by category (Figure 6).

Two other unique visual search features—Topic Finder and Term Frequency—appear both on the home screen (see Figure 1) and on portal pages (right side, Figure 6). The Topic Finder generates a keyword visualization based on text from titles, subjects, and a sampling of top search results (Figure 7), offering a visual approach to locating results related to a primary search. Clicking on a keyword in the graphic—for example, for the author Lewis Nordan, “Music of the Swamp”—takes you to a set of search results. The Term Frequency tracks a term or phrase over time and supplies quick links to documents relevant for a given year (Figure 8).

Accessibility within the Gale platform is very, very good. Gale’s VPAT ratings for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and 2.1 are A to AA for all criteria; Gale also complies with the revised Section 508 criteria (published January 18, 2017, and corrected in January 22, 2018). Gale’s literature platform received a 100% Gold rating in February 2024 from ASPIRE, a verification service for accessibility statements. Gale links to accessibility features and compliance in the footer of the LRC database.

LRC includes a toolbar of accessibility options (Figure, 9, with my highlight in red), which allows the user to translate an article into over 50 languages, shrink or enlarge text, change the background color and font, adjust the line, letter, and word spacing, or listen to an article. These features can be fine-tuned through the settings menu.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

Gale uses a standard five-page contract for all its products. Material can be used for digital course packs or electronic reserves but cannot be incorporated into a physical course pack or systematically downloaded to create a personal database. Standard scholarly and educational use is permitted, while commercial use or republication is not. Interlibrary loan is allowed in either electronic or hard copy format as long as the requests are occasional and fall within normal ILL fulfillment practices. COUNTER 4 and 5 (after 2019) statistics are available through the Gale admin site, along with SUSHI reporting. MARC records are available to import into integrated library systems. Upon termination, Gale offers assistance through Portico to provide uninterrupted access to licensed content.

Academic library subscription pricing for Gale Literature Resource Center starts at $12,429 annually and is based on an institution’s full-time enrollment and other variables. Public library pricing is based on population served and starts at $3,000 annually. Potential customers should contact their Gale representative for the most current pricing and for consortial purchase information. A free trial for the product can be requested at: https://rebrand.ly/2cfysox.

Authentication Models

All Gale products are available both in the library and remotely through a number of authentication methods, including Athens, cookies, IP filtering, GeoIP, Kerberos, LDAP, NCIP, OASIS SAML 2.0, proxy servers, referring URL, Shibboleth, SIP/SIP2, username/password, Microsoft Office 365, Google, X.509 authentication certificates, and Remote Patron Authentication Services (RPAS) (which can provide access via library card number lookup, username/password lookup, password lookup, OPAC/institution patron file lookup, barcode pattern analysis and/or lookup, and driver license or state ID lookup).

Competitive or Related Products

The main competing database to LRC is EBSCO’s Literary Reference Source. Both are full-text databases, designed to be easily browsed, targeting high school students and undergraduates. EBSCO has different book sources than Gale and includes slightly fewer journals. Both companies also offer additional, less comprehensive literature products.

MLA International Bibliography has much more extensive journal coverage (22,000+ titles) than either the EBSCO or Gale databases. However, MLA’s interface is not designed for lower-level students; because it is an abstracting and indexing database, students must utilize the database’s controlled vocabulary to search effectively.

Critical Evaluation

As a librarian with experience in the sciences, I cannot evaluate the content of LRC as a subject expert. However, I can assess LRC like an undergraduate student taking an introductory literature course, and from that view, there is a lot to like.

The spotlighted works and topics on the main page are visually appealing (Figure 1) and make the page accessible to a beginning literature student. Finding a novel of interest under featured works—Catcher in the Rye—I’m drawn to an image of an Inuit woman ice fishing in an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History referenced fondly by Holden as something that never changes, and D.T. Suzuki’s 8,000+ word essay on Zen Buddhism, an influence on Salinger after his traumatic experiences during WWII. The editor, Brent Cline, a professor of American literature, did a good job choosing artifacts that allow the user to connect more deeply with Salinger’s story.

Moving on to the rest of the portal, the preset searches organized by category generally work well to direct your attention to relevant content, particularly if you are unsure of what aspect of a work or author you are interested in writing about. However, if you have specific themes that you wish to explore, the search box may be more helpful.

The category searches sometimes produce scatter, a term used by Gale to describe results that are not very related. For example, when I search for the author Lewis Nordan, the Literature Criticism results include an essay that only mentions Nordan in passing as representative of a particular genre or style of writing, and another that refers to a tavern in Nordan’s work, Wolf Whistle, while focusing primarily on the strange alcohol laws of the South. Poets & Writers Magazine lists Nordan and other authors that have died recently but provides no biographical information.

Using the filter “Person-about” and choosing the author’s name reduces the Literature Criticism results from 32 to 14, all of them quite relevant. But students have short attention spans for ambiguous or irrelevant results before they head back to the comfort and familiarity of Google. Gale might consider tweaking their search algorithm to reduce this scatter.

Although the featured portals are great, the visual topic finder and term frequency search are less so. When I used the “topic finder” search on the homepage or explored the portal results from a search (see Figure 7), all the results seemed too broad or weirdly associated. That’s not to say one couldn’t find relevant sources through this search type, but likely not as a first-line approach. The “term frequency” search can have value, but only when you’re looking at more recent literature. For example, searching “Southern gothic” only shows resources starting in 1974, while the term has been in use at least since the mid-1930s (Glasgow, 1953). This likely reflects a lack of historical resources in Literature Resource Center.

LRC also lacks depth compared to a database like MLA International Bibliography. Think of the case where an upper-level undergraduate student is writing on themes in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Doing a focused search in LRC (such as: Flannery O’Connor [Person-By or About] and A Good Man is Hard to Find [Named Work]) only retrieves one result under the category Literature Criticism and four total results. The same search constructed in MLA International Bibliography returns 127 results, many of them involving some sort of literary analysis.

Recommendation

Gale’s Literature Resource Center is an excellent database for high school and lower-level undergraduate students. The visually appealing featured works and topics, curation of primary sources, and portal pages that categorize results make the database very accessible. With 100 percent full text, users can easily retrieve content without having to navigate a link resolver.

The problem comes when you consider the cost of LRC relative to its limitations. For my university of approximately 7,200 FTEs, the annual subscription cost to LRC is about $20,000. (Note, we pay significantly less because several years ago we contributed a large up-front cost to get LRC as a Gale Digital Archive, and now only have to pay the annual hosting fee and annual 3–5 percent increases.) If LRC could satisfy the research needs of an English department from first-year students through graduate students and faculty, then the high annual subscription cost might be worth it. But the depth of LRC is not comparable to MLA International Bibliography, and the further a student moves through a college English program, the more likely they are to need additional sources. Depending on an institution’s budget, that could be a tough sell.

References

Glasgow, E. (1953, May 4). Heroes and Monsters. The Saturday Review, 3.