Short Story Criticism missing content

Problem: NM reported missing content (pg 182-191) in v. 75 of the Online Short Story Criticism, part of the Literature Criticism Online.

Assigned to: ej

Priority: high
Status: Resolved
Troubleshooting notes:
9/2/10 EJ contacted Gale
9/7/10 contacted LV at Gale and received this helpful reply:
THE SHORT STORY: Due to licensing restrictions, a small portion of critical articles, give or take about 5%, are not allowed to be made available in electronic format.
I don’t have a list of what has been excluded, and have asked the product manager if a list actually exists. If one is available, I will send it to you.

THE LONG STORY (excerpted from a response by Sam Priestley, VP Print Sales, to a customer inquiry):
When moving heavily copyrighted material from the original print to online resources it is very common for some of the material to have to be excluded from the online version exactly because it is copyrighted material. Not every rights holder wants their material to be available in an online format. This is not a Gale choice, and Gale fully supports the U.S. Copyright Code. The standard for exclusion – the amount that cannot be included online – is about 20% for most print resources and sometimes very much higher. As many publishers – or online search sites – have found when they decide to move print collections online is that they are not the final arbiters of what gets included and what does not. The copyright holder gets that choice.

Given this background information when Gale decided to move the contents of its 10 core literature criticism titles from print to online through the Literature Criticism Online product we anticipated we would have some exclusions to contend with in the database. In fact the total exclusion rate is an average of about 5% of the total critical file. This is much lower than we had anticipated. In point of fact we would have been happy with less than the 20% normal average. Please note that the exclusions are from the critical file only – none of the biographies, bibliographies, special introductions and other Gale owned material is missing. All of the authors are still covered. In fact, the reason Literature Criticism Online appears as a searchable PDF style archive product is because it allows us to include well over 90% of the critical file. In a standard database style format the exclusion rate would have made the product unsearchable. All excluded articles now have a sentence that says the contents are not viewable. In an upcoming upgrade that phrase will be replaced by the actual citation for the article that was there.

Another point is that the excluded critical entries come almost entirely from the volumes produced between 1998 and today. Volumes previous to 1998 have almost 100% inclusion. Our goal is to have 100% parity between the print and online products.

What does this mean to the average user of Literature Criticism Online? Many users may go for a long time and never encounter an excluded article. Others seem to run into them with every other search. Since the exclusion rate is only about 5% (please note that this moves up and down as new volumes are released so the percentage changes constantly) it is simply an individual user experience. Also, while the overall rate is 5% that does not mean that actual individual entries include those with no exclusions at all, to just 1 or two, to a few with almost half the entries. That is really rare by the way. However, it happens.

Now, how about the actual user – the student? There are two things to consider. First, no matter what any university’s search policies are, no matter how skilled their librarians are, no matter how finely tuned their goals - to the average student of today that compilation of paper between two covers called a literature criticism volume is an antique concept designed to be ignored. Print does not exist in general and print reference is simply an antique and quaint concept. Secondly, most students will spend much of their time actually working outside of normal library hours and outside of the library itself. Just looking at usage statistics by time of day will tell you the truth of that. Gale and our customers have watched the usage of the print volumes recede to a fraction of what they used to be and yet the need for the content has doubled. Why the mismatch? Simply if it is not online and available when it is needed then it just does not exist. The 5% missing content has very little meaning to a student as the content that remains is generally overwhelming in size still. Or, as I often relate, to a student in a dorm at 2AM does the fact that there are now 97 Hemingway essays instead of 103 provide a real stumbling block? Well, to the rare student wanting one of the missing 6 I am sure it does but to 99% of students they would never even notice.

Let me know if you have any additional questions.Liz
800-877-4253 x1762
ej