We’re a small scholarly publisher of large collections of primary texts in the humanities and social sciences. We’re small, but our collections are very large! We absolutely have to get them right. Customer criticism has been one of the best ways to do this. If we don’t listen to our customers, how can we be sure we’re building products that they need?

In 2000 when Alexander Street was founded, Eileen and I noticed that the values of librarianship and traditional publishing were getting lost in the rush to digitize materials. In the midst of the dot-com craze, values such as indexing, quality, careful commissioning, and selection of material were being ignored. Our friends in libraries were vocal about this – they suggested that there was an opportunity for us to do something about it! So right from the start, we set out to provide services that answered criticism.

Our experience had been that most librarians have the interests of their patrons at heart and that their feedback is positive. And indeed, so many of our products have changed dramatically in response. In one case a librarian said to me, “Stephen, you’re planning a database of dead, old, white men that’s available in every library and is simply not where scholarship is today!” It was painful, but that kind of feedback allowed us to see where I was going wrong and change the product. And thank goodness for that criticism! A bad idea grew into a great idea after more listening, and today Early Encounters in North America is one of the gems of our collections.

Another Eileen quote says this very well: “By the time we complete a new project, I want the customers to see their fingerprints all over it”. We hope the customers do, because they’ve been very heavily involved in every project’s creation. We are in their debt.

How have you changed your marketing and sales operations in response to library reactions?

Eileen has run the marketing and sales activities from the start, building always on customer relationships. Our philosophy is, “Why not make it easy?” Librarians are fair and wonderful people, and if we offer them something reasonable in return – fair pricing, easy licensing terms, interesting and considerate marketing communications – they will be our customers.

We’ve grown with our customer base! At the start, we had a few products for the ARLs. Marketing was natural; Eileen and I just picked up the phone and talked to people. Mary Siegel, who had been one of senior sales reps at our old company, was standing by eager for us to rehire her, which we did after about seven months when things became way too busy for us. The next change came when many of our collections passed through second and third releases and were ready for selling as subscriptions – we needed more hands again. We added Sarah Glass a year and a half ago, just recently moved Jeremy Johnson from editorial into telesales, and may be hiring again. In marketing, we recently added Jennifer Heffelfinger as manager, to lend her experienced hand to the process.

At the same time, we’ve brought up an international business, with customers in the UK, Ireland, Japan, Australia, Eastern and Western Europe. Our international distributors are thoroughly trained by Eileen to sell in the same personal, fair way. Nothing much has changed since the start, really. We have an idea, we talk about it, and we listen, listen, listen.

You've developed some innovative approaches in at least two key areas: a. Content Development and long term planning for that content's survival b. Pricing and licensing.Explain how your company decides what products to create, and how it goes about doing that. How do you decide what areas to pursue? Who identifies specific items- for the collections you've created. How do you identify whom you need to work with to create and see a project through to its end and how do you get them to work with you?

The whole thing begins with our getting enthusiastic about a particular area of the humanities. The idea may come from customers, from one of our staff, or from one of the projects we’re already doing. For example, Black Thought and Culture was born when one of our editors noticed some particularly interesting introductions to the plays we were indexing for our Black Drama collection. They talked at length about the author’s background and experiences as a black person and how “being black” informed the play. This provided the basic idea for Black Thought and Culture, in which dozens of black American leaders from all fields explain the evolution of thinking on what it means to “be black.”

Each product we do is assigned an internal editor whose job it is to become fully familiar with the content and to liaise with our editorial boards. The editorial boards are composed of academics and librarians. They trawl through bibliographies, talk with authors, booksellers, scholars, librarians, and archivists. We track the shape of the collection to make sure it’s balanced – we don’t want to miss out important items.

We also look for areas that have been poorly served by existing publishers or where our Semantic Indexing can enable new kinds of scholarship. Often this leads us to collections that lend voice to underrepresented or disenfranchised groups. For example, we found that women playwrights have struggled and are still struggling to get their materials published and performed. We also found a good deal of theatrical ephemera that is unpublished and that would really help students understand these plays. Finally, a well-indexed corpus of a large number of plays would have interest to disciplines beyond drama – such as history, sociology, women’s studies, and more. This led us to create our collection of women’s drama.

Perhaps the most important part of creating new products is the interaction with the customer. Aside from the salespeople’s visit, Eileen and I personally make some 60 library site visits per year. We don’t begin building a product until we start getting a “Wow!” from the librarians. And it has to be a ”Wow!” We have a pretty long list of ideas we’ve decided not to go with – it’s tough because a lot of them are someone’s (my) personal favorites. Alas, the response we’ve gotten from our customers on many of the ideas has been ”Interesting” and “Perhaps” rather than WOW!

How is the material being digitized?

A lot of the material we’re digitizing is rare, hard to find, and previously unpublished. So one of the toughest things we face is to find/scan/copy the material itself. Much of this happens at university libraries and archives. For example, we work with the University of Virginia and others to scan much of the rare and previously unpublished material in situ. Once the material is collected and marked-up, we then send it to be re-keyed or transcribed.

Almost all of our material is triple keyed. This involves three individuals re-keying the same text. A computer compares the three versions. If it finds an error in one of the three texts, it will go with the other two. If all three versions disagree, then another human will resolve the difference. This process is more costly than others, and the result is material as close as we can get to 100% accurate.

The hardest and most labor-intensive part of the digitization process is the indexing. More than two thirds of our staff are indexers who read through the materials and assign subject headings. These specialists are critical – it’s they who create the Semantic Indexing that makes the collections uniquely accessible.

Yes. I’ve noticed that much of your literature talks of ‘semantic indexing’. What is this and why do you see it as important?

More and more materials are being made available electronically – and yet most of the tools we are given to search and explore the materials are restricted to keyword searching and indexing systems that were designed for paper.

Our Semantic Indexing is a new form of tagging that categorizes elements within the content rather than the original printed artifact. For example, instead of indexing just the book, we index each of the letters within the book. Each letter can be tagged to indicate when it was written, where it was written, who wrote it, who received it, and so on. The benefit of doing this is that now researchers can explore the material in completely new ways. They can find letters by place (where written, where sent, place described, and so forth), person (author, recipient, etc.), date, subject, and so on that otherwise would have been hidden. An OPAC or a book index can’t do it, but our database can easily answer a question such as, “Show me all the letters and diary entries written by single mothers in their twenties living on farms during the Depression, addressing the subject of hunger.”

Our efforts with the form of indexing are just a small part of the wider initiatives leading to the Semantic Web. The promise is that as we code digital surrogates with the attributes of their real world counterparts, they’ll be able to interact automatically with each other. And that will result in enormous efficiencies and additional functionality.

You've spoken repeatedly about many different kinds of pricing models. Why these two, (up front with small continuing fees, and "normal" sized annual pricing) and what do you think this ultimately will provide for your company and for libraries deciding to pay for your collections. What else are you considering for pricing models?

During my career, I’ve been lucky enough to work with more than a hundred different publishers and to chat through how and why they set prices in various ways. I learned a few very basic rules as a consequence of this. One is to set prices to give us much value as possible. If there’s a way to give customers more value without raising your costs, you should do so.

We also try to come up with pricing that “fits” our content. Our products contain materials that are going to be of lasting value for the foreseeable future – like plays, film scripts, and so on. So we want to make it possible for libraries to pay once and not have to find new money every year. This led us to create a one-off payment model with a very low annual access fee (and I mean low - $50 to $200).

At the same time, we recognize that many libraries have very limited budgets, so we have subscription prices on a sliding scale, making the collections affordable to everyone. Here too, we listen to customers carefully. We recently added additional discounts in consideration of very low FTE.

The major problem I see going forward is that there is no effective business model for smaller products. This has negative consequences for libraries – we’re seeing ever-larger aggregations of content at the expense of smaller, dedicated databases. Most of the large aggregations are sold on a subscription-only basis. Aside from the strain this puts on the serials budget, this practice creates other problems. It prevents libraries from building collections for the long term, and it reduces the economic reward for publishing high quality content.

In early 2004, we’ll be launching a new model that we hope will rectify the problem, by way of a new series of “Conductor” databases. The first of these will be our Oral History Online project. The model is very simple. You’ll be able to buy individual, full-text collections of oral history to own on CD-ROM. Each individual collection can be purchased separately, with no recurring fees, so it will be easy to build a comprehensive full-text collection, customized to your individual needs. The only recurring expense will be your subscription to the “conductor,” Oral History Online, a regularly updated index. That conductor will give you Web access to all of the full-text collections you’ve purchased, along with access to everything freely available on the Web. As librarian, you will build as large or as small a full-text collection as you want, with the precise content up to you.

Can you explain how Alexander Street, is planning on providing archive level survivability of its content-that is part of why libraries are purchasing your products, so how are you going about keeping that commitment?

Most of our collections contain primary sources that have “permanent” value. We fully expect them and the materials they contain to be researched and used hundreds of years from today. To make sure that this can happen, we allow libraries to purchase permanent access.” The library has the rights in perpetuity to deliver the content to its patrons. If they wish to offer access to the collections via one of our servers, there is a low annual access fee.

To ensure that the materials will not be lost, we’re providing purchasers with SGML files of the content that they can either archive or load on their local systems. In addition, we have a relationship with the University of Chicago that can provide access for smaller institutions if one of our products is ever discontinued for commercial reasons.

This is not to say that we’ve solved any of the long term issues in how to migrate content to new technologies. Our strategy is to meet the best technical standards of the day and to give librarians a license that lets them manage the issue.

You've been talking about some key web sites and how they could be made more permanent, have a long-term future. Can you talk more about that?

A couple of years ago, one of our editors noticed the wonderful Women and Social Movements website, published by two well-known academics – Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. The site had received accolades from a wide range of publications – including the Journal of American History – and was getting some 30,000 academic visits per month!

Unfortunately, the funding for the site was nearing an end, so the authors were left with a quandary -- freeze the site as it was, or find a new source of funding. As we chatted through the options with them, it became apparent that by working together we could not only keep the site going, but also we could expand it dramatically. We could free the scholars from the mundane business of maintaining a website and let them concentrate on commissioning new content.

So in December, we launched a redesigned Website. In terms of pages, it’s more than 10 times the size of the existing website, and it contains a good amount of newly commissioned material. It’s indexed semantically, so users can get at the material in completely new ways. Another benefit to scholars is that the materials within the site now can be formally cited and become a full part of the scholarly discourse.

We plan to keep most of the existing site freely available – so preserving the benefits of the original site for those who are unable to pay for it.

Explain what happens when a library calls with a service issue.

Jen Hewitt answers the phone! We’re small enough to be able to keep things personal. Jen will route the query to our technical staff, to a customer support person, or to sales.
 

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