Introduction to Gale Group/InfoTrac
(Rev. Sep 09 04)
- Information Access
Company was one of the leading publishers of online-accessible
databases since the early 1980s.
- It was acquired by publisher
Ziff-Davis.
- Later, when the Ziff family
decided to sell off the publishing firm, IAC was sold to
the Thompson PLC, a giant publishing conglomerate that also
bought Gale Publishing and Dialog.
- Gale was a long-time
publisher of reference books, later moving into the production of
online databases largely based on their book publishing.
- Example:
Encyclopedia of Associations
- IAC and Gale have
been merged into the Gale Group, remaining a subsidiary of
Thompson Corp. The IAC databases are now marked under the
name InfoTrac.
InfoTrac's (Gale
Group) Success
- InfoTrac has been the most
successful vendor of online databases to the academic, public, and
special libraries market because:
- It created so many databases
and combined and recombined information in them to make new
databases and other information products.
- Examples:
- Records (citations,
abstracts, and full-text records) from some journals in
the specialized Computer Publications Database are
included in InfoTrac's General Reference (Magazine
Index), Expanded Academic, Business Reference, and other
databases.
- InfoTrac reconfigures and
tailors combinations of records to create databases for
specific markets, including school (TOM and SuperTOM),
public libraries (Magazine Index/General Reference),
college/university (the various Academic DBs).
- It has the most successful
marketing of all of the database producers. For example, its
DBs are available through DIALOG and other database utilities
as well as directly to the libraries, companies, and other
organizations.
- InfoTrac has the advantage
of economies of scale.