Gale Group

Company information

• Date founded: 1998
• Industry: Library Reference Content
• Corporate headquarters: Farmington, Michigan
• Type: Division of Cengage (Public)

Overview

Formerly called Gale Research and the Gale Group, Gale is an American library reference company that has been a division of Cengage since 2007. Gale was formed in 1998 through the merger of Gale Research, the Information Access Company, and Primary Source Microfilm. Gale is a world leader in research and educational publishing for academic, school, and public libraries as well as businesses. The company produces hundreds of products and is well-known for its subscription online databases, including Gale OneFile (formerly Infotrac), which contains millions of articles from more than seventeen thousand journals.

Gale is also renowned for its print imprints, such as Macmillan Reference USA, Charles Scribner's Sons, Primary Source Media, Scholarly Resources, the TAFT Group, Twayne Publishers, and St. James Press, to name a few. The company produces eBooks about literature, religion, sociology, engineering, medicine, and many other subjects.

Gale is a part of Cengage, an American educational development and technology company. Through Gale, it offers educational content along with digital and print learning solutions to the K-12, higher education, and vocational markets. Cengage is one of the five largest college textbook publishers in the United States. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Cengage has about 4,500 employees in forty countries.

History

The Gale Research Company was founded in 1956 by Frederick Gale Ruffner, Jr. and his wife, Mary. The company began by selling only one reference book, the Encyclopedia of Associations. By 1985, when Ruffner sold the company to International Thomson, Gale Research had more than two thousand books in print and a staff of four hundred employees in Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, and New York City. In 1998, Thomson created the Gale Group by combining Gale Research and the Information Access Company and Primary Source Media. After this, Thomson sought to expand the company’s offerings. In 1999, it acquired Macmillan Library Reference (MLR) USA from Pearson for $86 million. MLR was comprised of publishers specializing in products for public and academic libraries. MLR produced the Dictionary of American Biography, the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and the Dictionary of Scientific Biographies. Its imprints included Scribner’s Reference, Macmillan Reference, Thorndike Press, Twayne Publishers, Schirmer, and G. K. Hall.

In 2005, Thomson announced plans to sell its learning division because it did not fit in with the company’s long-term strategies. Thomson divided the sale into three separate transactions: corporate education and training; assessment; and higher education and library reference, the largest group, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of Thomson Learning’s revenue in 2005. Divisions within this third group included Gale, Wadsworth, South-Western, Delmar Learning, and Course Technology.

While industry experts speculated that Thomson Learning would be purchased by Houghton Mifflin, Pearson, Reed Elsevier, or McGraw-Hill, it was bought for $7.5 billion by a private equity consortium including Apax Partners, a private equity firm, and OMERS Capital Partners, a Canadian asset management company. The buyers named the new company Cengage Learning.

Impact

Gale is a world leader in providing educational content to academic, school, and college libraries as well as corporations. As of 2023, the company offered hundreds of products, including e-books and digital and print encyclopedias. Products for school libraries included Gale Academic OneFile, which offered millions of articles in many subjects along with the full text of The Economist and The New York Times; Gale In Context, which contains full-length newspapers and periodicals such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Popular Science. Also for these libraries was Gale Business: Plan Builder, which helps budding entrepreneurs start small businesses. Products for public libraries included Gale Presents: Peterson’s Career Prep, which aims to equip job seekers with the skills they need, and Gale Presents: Udemy, a collection of thousands of video courses. Miss Humblebee’s Academy helps young learners prepare for kindergarten.

Gale publishes thousands of biographies on politicians, scientists, authors, artists, and athletes, as well as on members of under-represented groups such as the LGTBQ+ community, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. The company’s many online databases include Gale Primary Sources, Gale Literature Resource Center, Gale Literary Criticism, and Gale In Context.

In 2020 and 2021, Gale began offering social and emotional learning (SEL) collections. The topics in these collections help students better understand mental health issues such as ADHD, anorexia, bulimia, depression, divorce, homelessness, self-injury, stress, substance abuse, and suicide. Gale has partnered with school districts throughout the country to provide students with anonymous access to mental health and wellness resources.

In response to school closures in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gale offered educators and libraries free access to many of its pre-K through undergraduate resources using an online hub. Included in these offerings were eBooks to help students and educators transition to virtual learning and content on health topics related to the pandemic.

Gale’s products have won many awards. In 2020, the company received the Dartmouth Medal for its Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. In 2021, Gale Presents: Miss Humblebee’s Academy won a CODiE Award for Best Pre-K/Early Childhood Learning Solution. During the same year, Women’s Studies Archive: Voice and Vision won a CODiE Award for Best Library Reference or Educational Database. In 2023, Gale received five Modern Library Awards from LibraryWorks for their products. In 2025, Gale earned four Modern Library awards, marking the fourth consecutive year the company received a platinum award from LibraryWorks.

Bibliography

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Wan, Tan. “In Move to ‘Unlimited’ Pricing Model, Cengage Hopes for a Comeback.” EdSurge, 4 Apr. 2018, www.edsurge.com/news/2018-04-24-in-move-to-unlimited-pricing-model-cengage-hopes-for-a-comeback. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

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