Gale’s SVP Paul Gazzolo Wants to Unlock the Publisher’s Information Vault

Here Gazzolo shares the steps Gale has already taken towards becoming a solutions provider and a global resource as well as his vision for the future.

What challenges do you face in your new role at Gale?
One of the challenges I face, and it's really a challenge for everyone in today's education environment, is the expectation that a product should be so simple to use that it only takes two clicks. That is, two clicks to get what you need and if you don't you're going to give up and go somewhere else. That mindset is both a challenge and opportunity for Gale.

I think Gale has a big opportunity to connect the student to the information by being on the platform that the student already uses, be it in a mobile application or a learning management system (LMS). We want to provide that deeper dive or different perspective on a topic that really forces students to think about something in a way that they hadn't before. That is my aspiration and Gale's aspiration to leverage the reference content so that students and researchers can find perspectives and insight they wouldn't have otherwise found.

How are you meeting users where they are?
I'll start with the things we have done, which I can take no credit for. The first is text and data mining, which we've added to some of our archives here at Gale. It allows for a much deeper comb-through of content in order to study different trends. We have a cluster feature, for example, which is a visualization of not just what you're searching but also related topics or areas of possible interest. It's almost an infographic that widens the input of what you were searching. It allows users to get much more precise and laser-like in terms of definitions and make connections they wouldn't have otherwise.