September 16, 2021

Hi, 

I am happy to announce the recent addition of 30 titles to our statewide ebook offerings. These titles were selected from lists provided by Gale in collaboration with Carrie Light and Laura Axon (thanks!), the K-12 reps on the Statewide Database Licensing Advisory Committee, to enhance the collection’s K-12 coverage. Last year’s new titles were mostly for elementary-age users, and this year’s ebooks are for middle and high schoolers and mostly focus on topics related to social and emotional learning or equity, diversity, and inclusion. 

Want to know which ebooks were added with this update? Sort column A of the Oregon Gale Ebooks Title List spreadsheet and look for “oregonsc2022” (no quotes). 

Access the Ebooks


All of the new titles have been integrated into the statewide collection available in the Gale eBooks database. That database is linked on the elementary and secondary Find Information pages on OSLIS. (Tip: Ebooks that are classified as K-5 by Gale staff are also available in Gale In Context: Elementary. To limit elementary students to just the K-5 ebooks, when a user clicks on the Gale eBooks database icon from the elementary Find Information page, they are directed to the ebooks landing page in Gale In Context: Elementary.) 

Text View vs. Book View

Gale offers two ebook views: text and book. Text view displays more like an article, and all of the Gale tools (such as the translate and listen options) are available when using the text view. On the other hand, the book view displays a scanned two-page spread of actual pages from the book, so only limited tools are available. In the Gale eBooks database, ebooks open in text view. Users can change to book view by selecting that option from the toolbar at the top of the ebook page. It’s the opposite for Gale In Context: Elementary – books open in book view, but users can change to text view by selecting that option from the toolbar at the top of the ebook page. 

Interactive Table of Contents


To access an interactive table of contents (ToC) when reading a book in the Gale eBooks database, click on the ToC icon in the toolbar at the top right of the page. For Gale In Context: Elementary, click on the “hamburger” menu icon at the top of the light blue left navigation panel. 

Translate Ebook Text


Users who want to read the text of any ebook in a different language may use the translate tool at the top of the page to select from over 40 languages. The translate tool is only available when using the text view. 

MARC Records & List of Titles

If you want to add MARC records to your library catalog, Gale provides them for all of the statewide ebooks available in the Gale eBooks database. Those are available on the MARC Records page of Gale’s support site for Oregon library staff. You may download a set(s) by audience level or create your own set. That page is also where the Oregon Gale Ebooks Title List spreadsheet “lives.” (Side note: There are also MARC records for the ebooks available through the National Geographic Kids (NGK) database. NGK has over 600 ebooks for elementary and middle school students!) 

FYI, this Google doc has the same information as this posting. 

Classroom teachers may want to know about the new ebooks. Questions? Please ask. 

Thanks,
Jen

Jen Maurer
School Library Consultant
State Library of Oregon