AccessMyLibrary.com - New Tool for Researchers

AccessMyLibrary.com is a new online research tool that genealogists and historians may find quite useful. It is a service of Thomson Gale, a company that provides databases of information to libraries across the United States.

The website itself is essentially an online database of Thomson Gale's collection of content, the same content that it provides to libraries, with the exception that the content now available is limited only articles published in a variety of magazines and newspapers. Eventually, Thomson Gale plans to place its entire collection of data here.

The caveat is that as a member of the general Internet-browsing public, you cannot access the full text of the articles, unless first having "authenticated" yourself as being an actual library patron. You can only view "snippets" of content. That is, only if you have a library card from a library that is currently a customer of Thomson Gale, will you be able to access the full text.

Unfortunately for me, my local library system is not a customer of theirs.

One the main selling points for AccessMyLibrary is that the "snippets" information that can be displayed to the general public is indexable by all the Internet search engines. Thomson Gale has created static links to every publication and every article in AccessMyLibrary. Hence, anytime you perform a search on Google or Yahoo, you may see links to AccessMyLibrary within the results.

Thomson Gale feels that this will ultimately draw the public into their local libraries in order to sign up for library cards. In addition, they feel that this will also help them sell their services to more libraries.

If you'd like to learn more about this, visit their "FAQ page".