Alexander Street Pess | Octoberr 08 Product Updates Bulletin

Classical Music Library has been moved to a new platform and now boasts a streamlined, easier-to-use interface as well as a number of functional enhancements. Users can now browse by album or limit advanced searches to identify complete works only, screening out all partial works from search results. This release also features a number of tools that let users create, annotate, and share playlists with content from anywhere on the Web. See it for yourself at http://clmu.alexanderstreet.com

PLEASE NOTE that though the new release of Classical Music Library is live, customer access will continue to point to the current site through December of 2008. There are links from the current site to the new platform, so by all means take a look and enjoy the new features, but please be aware that we will not be migrating your access until January, 2009. At that point, you won’t need to do anything, but you will be migrated over to the new platform—together with all user bookmarks and playlists.

If your library subscribes to or owns Classical Music Library, please take a moment to read the transition guidelines so that you understand when and how we will migrate your access to the new platform. If you have any questions, contact us at support@alexanderstreet.com
Opera in Video. We added one new video to this collection in October—Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, starring Anna Netrebko, Galina Gorchakova, Mikhail Kit, and Vladimir Ognovenko. Conducted by Valery Gergiev and performed by the Kirov Opera and ballet (1995 production staged at the Marlinsky Theatre, Russia).

◊ History ◊

Women and Social Movements 1600-2000. With this release of the joint project from Alexander Street Press and the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton (edited by Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin), we’ve migrated all subscribers over to a new platform featuring a brand new interface plus lots of new content and functionality. (Subscribers will continue to have access to the old site for the next three months via a link on the collection home page.)

New content for both the Basic and the Scholar’s Edition includes six new document projects (for a grand total of 85 live document projects). Subscribers to the Scholar’s Edition will also gain access to more than 72,000 new pages of content from the State Commissions on the Status of Women as well as the first three volumes of Harvard University Press’s landmark five-volume Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, available here for the first time in electronic form (with the final two volumes to be added within the next year or so).

To see more information about this release and to browse the new site for free, visit http://wass.alexanderstreet.com

The American Civil War Research Database. The semiannual release of this collection is part of our ongoing commitment to ensure the constant improvement of records and battle descriptions. The latest release of this collection includes data corrections and improvements to solider record, battle, and regiment data. Approximately 150,000 new data points have been added to the database, including additions to dates of birth, places of birth, dates of death, place of burial, and many more. In addition, roughly 1,500 images have been added, bringing the total number of images to well over 16,000 photographs. To see a chart that gives a current database status update for this collection, go to http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/cwdb/cwdb.database.status.aspx

◊ Social Science ◊

Social Theory. Now in its 7th release, this collection features 36 new titles, including 19 new titles in German by Jurgen Habermas (Suhrkamp Verlag Gmbh & Co. KG); Theodor Adorno’s Aspects of Sociology (Beacon Press); Etienne Balibar’s Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso); Jean Baudrillard’s America (Verso); 7 volumes from Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (International Publishers); and 6 articles by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman, including: “A Protest Against Petticoats,” “Causes and Uses of the Subjection of Women,” “Divorce and Birth Control,” “Some Light on the Problem,” “The Nobler Male,” and “The Right to Die.” As of this release, the collection now includes more than 90,000 pages from 274 works by 94 authors.

◊ Literature and Drama ◊

As a result of very good feedback and requests from a number of you, we’ve separated our literature package offering into two distinct components: Alexander Street Literature and Alexander Street Drama.

Alexander Street Drama includes 7 individual theatre collections, including: Asian American Drama, Black Drama: Second Edition, Latino Literature, North American Theatre Online, North American Women’s Drama, North American Indian Drama, and Twentieth Century North American Drama. The vast index that is North American Theatre Online powers the package’s combined search capabilities.

Alexander Street Literature now consists of a total of 8 individual literature collections, each a core part of our ambition to publish the most comprehensive resource on the literatures of place, race, and gender. Individual collections included in this specially priced package offering include: Black Short Fiction and Folklore, Black Women Writers, Caribbean Literature, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, Latin American Women Writers, Latino Literature, Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, and South and Southeast Asian Literature.

Coming in 2009, for those libraries that subscribe to both Alexander Street Literature and Alexander Street Drama, you will be able to cross-search all 14 individual collections from a single, unified interface.

Earlier this year, Alexander Street released Black Drama: Second Edition, which adds 110 plays (for a total of 1310 plays) from 210 playwrights to the collection. In order to give as many people access to this greatly enhanced collection as possible, we've decided to move all current subscribers over to the new collection at no cost beyond the 5% renewal increase--for what is effectively a 16% increase in content. Purchasers of Black Drama can upgrade to the Second Edition by making a one-time purchase to the Black Drama upgrade module. Please note that if you are a subscriber to the first edition of Black Drama , you will automatically be migrated to the Second Edition upon your renewal date.

New and notable additions to the second edition include plays written by Pearl Cleage (American), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupean), Alice Childress (American), Femi Euba (Nigerian), James Weldon Johnson (American), Adrienne Kennedy (American), Anna Deveare Smith (American), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenyan), Roy Williams (English), and many others.

Thanks to a new publishing partnership with the highly regarded Peepal Tree Press in the UK, we’re in the process of adding nearly 30,000 new pages of content to the following collections over the next year—including a significant round of new content this month.

Black Women Writers. We’ve added 24 new titles to this collection from Peepal Tree Press this month, including: 5 works of fiction by Beryl Gilroy (British Guyana), who was London’s first black head teacher and one of Britain’s most significant post-war Caribbean migrants. Also in this release is Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom, by Marcia Doublas (Jamaica), which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the U.K.; as well as work by Jamaica Kingston (Jamaica); poet Merle Collins (Grenada); Jean Goulbourne, Brenda Flanagan, Michelle Gargar, Delores Gauntlett, and many others.

The addition of more than 80 new titles by Peepal Tree Press authors to Caribbean Literature include:
- Eight works of poetry by Kwame Dawes. Though born in Ghana, Dawes lived most of his life in Jamaica and is considered one of that country’s most important contemporary poets.
- Playwright and short story writer Earl Lovelace, who was born in Toco, Trinidad and grew up in Tobago. His most recent novel, Salt, was published in 1996 and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1997.

South and Southeast Asian Literature. New content released in September includes more than 35 new titles:
- Six novels by the popular and best-selling author Timeri Murari, including The Field of Honor, and The Imperial Agent.
- Five novels (including Disappearance) and a long narrative poem, Turner, by the well known British Guyana author David Dabydeen.
- The Writer and his Wife and Other Stories, the second collection of short stories by Trinidad-born Canadian author Rabindranath Maharaj.