Reference at Newman Library

What To Do When a Gale Database Won’t Load

Today I learned about an odd problem that seems to only be affecting Firefox: when you try to connect to some (but not all) Gale databases from our library site, you get an error page from Gale suggesting that there is a problem with our website. I’ve seen this problem especially with MLA International Bibliography and with Academic OneFile. If you use another browser–Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer–you shouldn’t see this problem. But if you’re in Firefox, you can make it go away by clearing the browser cache.

Mozilla’s instructions for clearing the cache suggest these steps:

  1. Click the menu button New Fx Menu and choose Options.

  2. Select the Advanced panel.
  3. Click on the Network tab.
  4. In the Cached Web Content section, click Clear Now.
    clear cache incontent
  5. Close the about:preferences page. Any changes you’ve made will automatically be saved.

If that fails to load the page, then go back to the databases page, find the link again, and click it to relaunch the database. If it still comes up with the error message from Gale, refresh the page (hit the F5 keyboard button or click the “reload this page” button on the browser toolbar).