Thomson Gale™, a business of The Thomson Corporation, is a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. Best known for its accurate and authoritative reference content as well as its intelligent organization of full-text magazine and newspaper articles, the company creates and maintains more than 600 databases that are published online, in print, as eBooks and in microform.
In addition to serving the school and library communities, Thomson Gale also licenses its proprietary content for integration within Web-based information services. Nearly 100 organizations — including Looksmart, Borders, Dow Jones and Thomson Financial — presently enjoy strategic business distribution partnerships with Thomson Gale.
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The Situation
Thomson Gale offers a subscription service to their online database. The database contains XML images of historic newspapers, manuscripts and other documents and is made accessible to researchers via the web.
Generally speaking, Thomson Gale’s customer list consists of libraries and universities. A university, for example, will pay for a subscription to the image database to access the information via the web. As the cost for access to this information is significant, customers will also get a hard copy of the data in the form of a tape to keep for proprietary reasons. The data is delivered via SDLT tapes which have a high storage capacity.
Thomson Gale was updating their library of images to provide an enhanced and expanded database for subscribers on a regular basis. The updates were stored on DLT tapes requiring numerous tapes to hold all the data. In order to cost effectively provide hard copies of the data to subscribers, Thomson Gale needed an efficient way to consolidate and duplicate the data.
How Inforonics Helped
Thomson Gale approached Inforonics in 2003 for a one time project to assist with putting their Eighteenth Century Collections online. Once the data was made available via the web for subscribers, Thomson Gale had to find a way to also provide the database in hard copy. Inforonics began consolidating the data from DLT tapes to SDLT tapes. Once it was consolidated, Inforonics began mass producing duplicate tapes to be mailed to Thomson Gale subscribers by the publisher. The seamless process made Thomson Gale business transactions so much more efficient, they signed a contract for monthly tape consolidation and duplication services that has continued for 4 years.