The Suppression Continues — GVRL Four Years Later by Norman Buchwald | Council of Chief Librarians

The Suppression Continues — GVRL Four Years Later by Norman Buchwald, Information Literacy and Technology Librarian, Chabot College

March 17, 2016 In the May 2012 issue of CCL Outlook, I wrote an article describing that some of the E-books that Gale sells in their Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) platform are not 100% full-text.

Read the original article “What! GVRL Text Suppression” /sites/default/files/reviews/Documents/GVRLtextsuppression5_12.pdf

There were 27 series, each having at least 15 instances of significant blocks of text missing. When found in a search result, the E-book article included the following message: “This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.” …

Read the update to this report “The Suppression Continues” at: /sites/default/files/reviews/Documents/TheSuppressionContinues.pdf

Read the Gale response : Statement to Council of Chief Librarians re: article on content suppression within GVRL. Gale appreciates CCL’s important reviews of products and wants to take the opportunity to provide background, clarity and context on content within Gale Virtual Reference Library(GVRL), our ebook platform. Through GVRL, Gale strives to publish eBooks that include every word and image that appear in the print version of our titles. As more customers and users transition from print to electronic reference collections, this is an important priority for the company. Gale has been working to improve our licensing and publishing processes and as a result, we have reduced the incidence of content suppressions by 93% over the past four years. Today, just 2.4% of the total titles loaded to our platform since 2012 contain suppressed content.

Read the entire Gale comment here: /sites/default/files/reviews/Documents/GaleGVRLResponseMay2016.pdf