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July 2009
Important News
- We’ve given away 52 one-year subscriptions to American History in Video—one to a library in each state! We’re just back from ALA where we announced the 52 libraries that will receive a free, one-year subscription—see the list of libraries here. This is part of our response to the economic downturn—it’s one of the things we can do to help libraries facing budget cuts. We’ve also decided to really focus on helping you increase usage—keep reading for more details!
- Up, Up With Usage! In tough budget times, library usage and circulation statistics are more important than ever. Alexander Street’s new marketing support program will help you drive usage with lots of new marketing tools and promotional materials, including
- We’re also looking for input. If you’d like to be part of the usage conversation, join us on Facebook at
http://tinyurl.com/pt9h95 and find out what can happen when we work together to drive usage. Currently, we’re focusing specifically on ideas for promoting American History in Video, but what we learn can be applied to promoting any online collection.
- Local and Regional History Online: A History of American Life in Images and Texts is live! Produced in partnership with Arcadia Publishing, this collection includes more than 150,000 images—it will continue to grow to include thousands of Arcadia volumes and more than one million photographs and other primary materials. Each Arcadia book tells a small piece of American history, but when searched together through Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing™, the collection becomes a massive and powerful primary-source research tool for academic libraries, and a great way to bring local history and genealogical information into the public library. Learn more about the collection here, request a free trial, or watch an online demonstration now. Read the press release here.
- If you didn’t make it to ALA, or if you missed the Alexander Street Customer Appreciation Breakfast, you can see what you missed! Watch a video of Stephen Rhind-Tutt’s Alexander Street update here, and see our guest speaker, Gary Giddins, talk about life as a jazz, film, and culture critic here. If you’re a subscriber to American History in Video, you’ll want to watch the special training session we held at ALA here.
- Alexander Street MARC records to be available from OCLC soon! We’re in the process of finalizing a new agreement with OCLC that will make our MARC records available through WorldCat. We'll continue to provide our MARC records for free from our Web site, and going forward, if you subscribe to WorldCat Local or if you prefer to download our records from OCLC, you'll also be able to do so. The OCLC version of our records will include an OCLC number, making the records compatible with WorldCat Local. Alexander Street records should start to appear in the WorldCat system within about three months time. Stay tuned for more updates on this, or email us at marketing@alexanderstreet.com with questions.
- New product-level MARC records are now available here for the following collections, and item-level records are coming soon:
- American History in Video
- Counseling and Therapy in Video
- Local and Regional History Online
- Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries
- The Romantic Era Redefined
- The Sixties
- New item-level MARC records are now available here for the following collections:
- American Film Scripts (406 records). This is the final set of records for what is currently in the collection. We will add additional sets as new content is added.
- Women and Social Movements, Basic Edition (178 records). This is the first batch of records for this collection to be uploaded; more records will be added soon. Please note, if your library subscribes to Women and Social Movements, Scholar’s Edition, please do not download this set of records—we will be adding records for the Scholar’s Edition soon!
- The Digital Karl Barth Library (53 records). This is the final set of records for what is currently in the collection; new records will be added as new content is added.
Please note that, as an experiment, we are releasing this set of records (for The Digital Karl Barth Library) in both MARC8 and UTF-8 formats. All of the other record sets we offer are available only as MARC8. If there’s sufficient demand for the UTF-8 format, we will start releasing all records in both formats. If your library prefers to use the UTF-8 format, let us know with a quick email to marketing@alexanderstreet.com.
- The first batch of Classical Music Library records will be posted no later than the first week of August—stay tuned!
To keep up with forthcoming free MARC record releases, download our updated schedule here or sign up to receive an alert whenever new records are posted.
- American History in Video now includes documentaries from PBS! As a result of a new license agreement with PBS and WGBH we’re adding more than 200 hours of PBS programming, including important titles from the popular American Experience series; the Ken Burns documentaries Civil War and Jazz; and dozens of other titles. Access the complete bibliography here. In July, we added the following PBS titles, and many more will be added over the next few months:
- Summer of Love (American Experience series, 2007)
- Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (American Experience series, 1993)
- The March of the Bonus Army (2006)
- Roberto Clemente (American Experience series, 2008)
- Terry Sanford and the New South (2007)
Other new content in American History in Video includes more issues of Universal Newsreel and 21 new documentaries from The History Channel®, such as John Paul Jones: Captain of the High Sea and Thomas Jefferson: A View from the Mountain. To see the complete listing of titles added, visit the What’s New page at http://ahiv.alexanderstreet.com/WhatsNew. The collection now contains a total of 1,471 videos totaling about 460 hours. Additional documentaries from California Newsreel, Bullfrog Films, and Pennebaker Hegedus Films are coming soon together with archival footage from WPA and other sources.
| Increase usage with new promotion tools for American History in Video, including a bookmark, poster, user guide, video demo, digital billboard, and more. Access our new marketing toolkit here. |
- The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 grew by 42 sources totaling 939 pages in July, taking the total count to 145 sources totaling 36,160 pages. New functionality enhancements include a browse and search by item type, which let the user identify materials by categories including “button,”
 “lapel pin,” “poster,” and the more generic “ephemera.” Key content additions include:
- Four new books, including two memoirs with unique points of view: I Lived Inside the Campus Revolution, William Divale’s memoir of being an FBI informer during the height of student activism (Cowles Book Co., 1970) and Refuse: Memories of a Vietnam War Objector, Donald Simon’s memoir of being a conscientious objector (Broken Rifle Press, 1992)
- Four posters from the period, including William Weege’s “All the Way with LBJ,” “Kill, Kill,” and “Blessed are the peace makers.”
- 23 buttons and groups of buttons, including campaign artifacts, Woodstock memorabilia, a group of Martin Luther King, Jr. commemorative buttons, and political buttons.
- The full text of hearings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
- Other unique items including lapel pins, stickers, a Nixon brochure and Nixon club enrollment card, and a Kennedy matchbook.
- Black Thought and Culture, our award-winning collection of more than 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings from more than 1,000 major American black leaders and thinkers, has been upgraded and moved to a new platform to enhance search performance and navigation—you’ll also notice a fresh new look designed to aid navigation and ease of use.
- Please Note that the new release of this collection is located at http://bltc.alexanderstreet.com. We'll maintain the previous version at http://alexanderstreet2.com/bltclive/ until November 1, when all users will be re-directed to the new site. If you or your users have made any bookmarks, those will automatically redirect to the new site—you won’t need to do anything.
Now cross-searchable via a single interface*, Alexander Street’s continuously growing music listening and reference collections constitute the broadest and most comprehensive online resource available for the study of classical, jazz, world, and American music. Only Music Online delivers audio recordings, video content, full-text reference materials, musical scores, liner notes, biographies, and images through a single interface.
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Alexander Street’s Music Online currently includes:
- 13,143 CDs
- 193,597 recordings
- 14,554 scores
- 52,491 pages of full-text reference
- 227 videos totaling 260 hours
- And hundreds to thousands of new recordings, scores, and pages of full-text reference are added every month.
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* Smithsonian Global Sound is the only Alexander Street music collection not yet cross-searchable via the Music Online interface; it will be added to the cross-search platform by October of 2009.
Here’s what’s new since our last update:
- We’ve just made important new functionality enhancements to Classical Music Library! Highlights include:
- New “browse by composer” options let you navigate directly to all of the works by each composer—and to multiple performances of each work—from the same screen, reducing the number of clicks it takes to access this information.
- Each composer page links directly to the complete list of works for that composer and to the complete list of recordings of each work. Both links appear above the biography section on each composer page.
- You can now start listening to any performance directly from your browse or search results page—again reducing the number of clicks it takes to navigate the collection.
- You can now add recordings to playlists directly from your browse or search results page.
- New content just added to Classical Music Library includes more than 2,500 composer biographies.
- We’ve re-launched American Song! With this release, American Song has more than tripled in size, making it the only comprehensive, continuously growing, online resource to cover the entire history of American music—from colonial songs, American Indian music, and slave spirituals to folk music, jazz, and modern day forms such as reggae and hip-hop, including artists such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Booker T & The MGs, The Shirelles, Jackson Browne, The Kingston Trio, and lots more.
Responding to feedback from a number of libraries and users, we started by integrating the more than 17,000 recordings that were previously part of African American Song. Separately, we’ve added more than 35,000 new recordings to the collection. In the last month alone, we added 231 albums totaling 4,294 tracks. American Song now contains 3,275 albums totaling 57,465 recordings—and it’s all cross-searchable through Music Online.
- Classical Scores Library grew by 642 scores totaling 40,450 pages, all from contemporary music publisher Universal Edition. New scores include works by Richard Rodney Bennett, Alan Berg, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Anton Bruckner, Frederick Delius, Leos Janacek, Gustav Mahler, Frank Martin, Arvo Pärt, Max Reger, Wolfgang Rihm, Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and more. The collection now includes a total of 13,288 scores totaling 269,990 pages.
Classical Scores Library also features new technical features, including a faster-loading image viewer that makes it easier to access long scores, regardless of your bandwidth. The new image viewer lets you choose between the quick-loading, lower resolution jpg file and the traditional higher resolution PDF file for every score in the collection. Other enhancements include thumbnail images that let you see and scroll through multiple pages without having to open the score; and new printing options let you print an entire score, just a movement, or a range of pages you select. All of these enhanced features are also included within the new Music Online cross-search interface.
- African American Music Reference, the only comprehensive online resource on the history of black American musical expression, grew by 9 reference sources totaling 4,475 pages.
- Jazz from the Beginning, by Garvin Bushell and Mark Tucker (Da Capo Press, 1998).
- Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap, by Eithne Quinn (Columbia University Press, 2005).
- Ella Fitzgerald: The Complete Biography, by Stuart Nicholson (Routledge, 2004).
- Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement, by S. Craig Watkins (Beacon Press, 2005).
- Two books by Douglas Henry Daniels: One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable Story of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Beacon Press, 2005) and Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young (Beacon Press, 2002).
- The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz, by Gerald Majer (Columbia University Press, 2005).
- The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, by Shane White and Graham White (Beacon Press, 2005).
- Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Gayle F. Wald (Beacon Press, 2007).
- The only online collection of streaming video for the enjoyment and teaching of dance performance, Dance in Video grew by 14 new titles to a total of 164 videos totaling 124 hours. New titles added to the collection include videos from the Alive and Kicking Series; performances by the Cullberg Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theater, Li Chiao-Ping, and the American Dance Festival Repertory Company; interviews with Trisha Brown and Wu Jing Shu; and documentaries on ballroom dancing, the Royal Academy of Dancing, and the restaging of “State of Darkness” with Molissa Fenley and Peter Boal.
- Delivering the sounds of all regions from every continent, Contemporary World Music grew this month by 192 albums and 2,044 recordings to a total count of 1,638 albums, totaling 22,028 tracks. New content includes albums licensed from Appleseed Recordings, Black Sun Records, Buda Musique, Celestial Harmonies, Fortuna Records, Piranha Records, and World Music Network. New music includes afro-pop, ambient, chant, contemporary Celtic and British folk music, electronic, jazz fusion, new age, ska, and more.
Conferences We're Attending
The 31st National Media Market, October 4-8, Lexington, Kentucky
http://www.nmm.net/
This is the first time Alexander Street will participate at NMM as an exhibitor. If you’re headed to NMM, be sure to attend our screening sessions, where we’ll give demonstrations of each of our streaming online video collections American History in Video, Counseling and Therapy in Video, Theatre in Video, Dance in Video, and Opera in Video. You’ll also be among the first to hear about forthcoming collections in the Alexander Street Series of Critical Video Editions.
Alexander Street will be doing scheduled maintenance across all collections on AUGUST 13, 9:00 PM TO 3:00 AM EDT / GMT-5. Please be aware that you may see sporadic interruptions of up to one hour across all Alexander Street online collections on this date. In the event that downtime is prolonged for any reason, we will post alerts to each affected collection, and we will send an email to your technical services contact.
NOTE: If you would like to receive an email alert in the event of any Alexander Street system downtime (or if you would like to designate someone else to receive such alerts), please enter your contact information here.
Future Scheduled Maintenance Dates
Our maintenance window is always 9:00 PM TO 3:00 AM EDT / GMT-5.
- September 10
- October 8
- November 12
- December 10
Are there things you think we're not covering in this bulletin that we should or that you'd like to see? Please let us know by emailing us at marketing@alexanderstreet.com.
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