The Charleston Conference: November 2-5, 2005, Charleston, SC

Alexander Street hosted two juried product development forums at the Charleston Conference: "Music to your ears: Is Alexander Street's music program on the right track" and "New pricing model - FREE! In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories, and Narratives." We thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to interact with you and hear your ideas.

Developments: New Forms of Digital Content
Presented at the Council on Library and Information Resources, April 2005 (PDF file: Adobe Acrobat required)

Alexander Street Press president Stephen Rhind-Tutt presented on the future developments in digital publishing to the Council on Library and Information Resources, April 2005.

ALA Midwinter Technology Showcase: Tim Lloyd on audio archives
Presented at ALA Midwinter, 2005 (PDF file: Adobe Acrobat required)

Recent advances in digital technology have enabled librarians to make previously unpublished audio archives available through online databases. Whether these valuable archives contain recorded music, spoken word performances, oral history, or speeches, certain issues complicate their delivery.

For instance, rights clearances may require royalty payments or meeting of specific release conditions. Archivists also must balance audio compression and quality. Tim Lloyd presented on these issues at the ALA Midwinter meeting in January of 2005--you can read all about it here.

You've brought some great products to market, but perhaps even beyond that, some unusual ways of thinking about customers and products. I think I will never forget Eileen Lawrence, at the Top Management Round Table for SSP this last fall telling publishers: "Hug your critics" I suspect that this means something for the whole company, can you tell us what it means for Alexander Street Press?

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...

Early this year, Alexander Street Press embarked on an ambitious initiative to create an online index to English-language oral histories from around the world and dubbed it Oral History Online. Our goals are simple – to provide scholars, students, and lay people a quick way to find oral histories specific to their needs, and to give users click-through access to the interviews if they are available on the Internet.

This paper explores how well we are able to replicate physical artifacts in electronic form and suggests that we need to do more work on enabling their digital surrogates to be found, explored and analyzed.

This paper updates an earlier paper on pricing models, and examines different ways in which we value information.

This paper discusses semantic indexing and what it can do to improve the functionality of
electronic texts.

The most notable attribute of the Web is its inter-connectedness. Publishers need to examine their licensing strategies to make sure they're taking advantage of this.