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September 2009
Important News
- Recent Reviews
In the August 15 issue of Library Journal, Cheryl LaGuardia reviewed American History in Video, our growing online collection of newsreels and documentaries from PBS, A&E Network, The History Channel®, Bullfrog Films, California Newsreel, and more.
| “Based on content, design, and price, this product is a solid ten. It tops any other similarly themed resource in its field and, at this price, is an amazing deal. . . . This is a product I wish every library in the United States could make accessible to its researchers, from elementary-school children to history scholars, and everybody in between. Resoundingly recommended.”—Library Journal |
CHOICE also reviewed American History in Video in their September 2009 issue, calling it “A beautifully indexed film database.” The reviewer went on to note that “the price is fair. . . . Navigational features and indexing are superb. . . . In fact, the database’s information architecture is the best this reviewer has seen in a commercial database.” Read the complete review here.
- Free Access during Hispanic Heritage Month
September 15 is the anniversary of independence for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Mexico declared independence on September 16, Chile on September 18, and Belize on September 21. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15 through October 15, we’re offering free access to select full-text, online collections for libraries. Explore poetry, short stories, folk tales, novels, memoirs, non-fiction, and plays in both Spanish and English from Latino writers around the world.
Access these collections now through October 15:
Username: eviews
Password: hispanicheritage
Since our last update, we’ve released two new sets of item-level MARC records:
- Classical Music Library (350 records). This is the first set of records released for this collection; we will add additional sets as quickly as we can, so please stay tuned. Note that these records are available only in UTF-8 format due to problems some customers experience with the display of diacritics in MARC8 format. Please also note that we released an earlier version of this file in August, but discovered there were problems with the file; the September release is a corrected file.
- The Sixties (97 records). This is the first set of item-level records for The Sixties, and more are on their way.
To keep up with forthcoming free MARC record releases, sign up to receive an alert whenever new records are posted.
- American History in Video grew by 55 video titles totaling 68 hours since our last newsletter. It now includes 1,526 titles totaling 528 hours and will ultimately grow to include more than 5,000 videos and 2,000 hours of footage.
We continue to add newsreel footage to the collection, with new Universal Newsreel releases from 1965 covering the first flight of the F-111 aircraft, the first use of helicopters in combat, the death of Winston Churchill, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the East Coast’s Longshoreman’s Strike, the election of President Johnson, and lots of Big Ten football games.
New archival films include titles from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including Man Against the River, a film about the Ohio flood of 1937, and We Work Again, which deals with employment prospects for African Americans in the Depression era.
New PBS documentaries include:
- The complete Ken Burns Civil War series.
- Four episodes from the Ken Burns Jazz series—and the rest will be added soon!
- Two titles from the Ken Burns’ America series
- Nineteen titles from the American Experience series, including Roots of Resistance; One Woman, One Vote; The Gold Rush; Influenza 1918; The Orphan Trains; The Berlin Airlift; Building the Alaska Highway; Jimmy Carter; LBJ; Jonestown; The Great Transatlantic Cable; Korean War Stories; The Massie Affair; Race to the Moon; Return with Honor; Citizen King; Two Days in October; and Nixon.
Other just-added documentary content includes titles from one of our newest publishing partners, California Newsreel, the oldest non-profit film center focusing on documentaries about social justice and social issues. California Newsreel titles added to the collection include July ’64 (2006) and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002).
- We’ve added 1,786 pages / items to The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974, taking the total to more than 38,000 pages from 151 sources. New content includes:
- Two memoirs, one by civil rights champion and SNCC founding member John Lewis, and the other by activist and founding yippie Jerry Rubin.
- New materials on the women’s movement and its relation to civil rights and the new left.
- Oral histories from conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.
- New ephemeral content including an original SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) pamphlet, court documents related to Muhammad Ali and his conscientious objector status, and Woodstock and MLK buttons.
- An ideal primary research tool for students and scholars in women’s studies, pop culture, and social history, Twentieth Century Advice Literature grew by 45 titles totaling more than 7,800 pages and now includes a total of more than 96,000 pages from 556 sources. New “Guides to Business, Finance, and Professional Life” include titles such as The American Hairdresser Handbook (1928), Astroworld Amusement Park Host and Hostess Manual, and The Business Etiquette Handbook (1965).
New “Guides to Character and Self Improvement” include How to Get out of the Rat Race and Live on $10 a Month (1969) and The World of the Formerly Married (1966). “Guides to Health, Hygiene, and Personal Appearance,” now include Always Ask a Man: The Key to Femininity (1967); Healthy, Happy Womanhood from Social Hygiene Press (1920); and The Marvels and Oddities of Sunlight, while “Guides to Home Management” now include Practical Home Repair for Women (1966) and What to Eat in Wartime from the Tip-Top Bread Company. “Guides to Sex, Love, and Marriage” include Every Girl is Entitled to a Husband (1963); The Rational Management of Children (1967); and What is Right with Marriage (1929).
- Local and Regional History Online: A History of American Life in Images and Texts grew by 85 new Arcadia Publishing titles and more than 11,000 new images of America from virtually every state in the union as well as Canada. The collection now includes a total of 855 titles, which translates into 110,000 pages and 171,000 images. It will grow to include more than 5,000 titles, containing 640,000 pages and 1 million images. New content includes titles from the Arcadia “Images of America” series as well as “Black America,” “Postcard History,” “Campus History,” and “Voices of America.” Explore historical photographs from every era and region of the U.S. Compare architecture styles, public lands and parks, historical dress; trace the history of local towns and regions; or look for images and other primary materials relevant to the history of Americans of every race and ethnic group as well as photographs that vividly tell the stories of class and race relations, labor conditions, women’s rights, and immigration in America.
- With 12 new video titles totaling about 15 hours, Counseling and Therapy in Video now includes a total of 285 videos and roughly 314 hours. New titles include an interview with Lisa Firestone on the basics of Alzheimer’s counseling plus a wide range of therapy sessions, including family counseling, relationship therapy, suicide prevention, integrative psychotherapy, creative arts therapy, reality therapy, and brief relational therapy. Featured therapists include Allen E. Ivey, Robert Wubbolding, John Sommers-Flanagan, Evan Imber-Black, Harville Hendrix, David Scharff, Robert Firestone, and Jeffrey Kottler. To see a complete list of the new video titles added, visit the What’s New page (freely browseable without authentication) at http://ctiv.alexanderstreet.com/WhatsNew/
- We’ve added more than 1,700 new pages of full-text therapy transcripts to Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works taking the total to 63,600 pages of material, including more than 16,000 pages of session transcripts, more than 22,000 pages of client narratives, and more than 24,000 pages of secondary reference material.
The new, completely anonymized, in-office psychiatrist-patient conversations added to the collection represent a wide variety of therapeutic practices and techniques. Transcripts include sessions with individuals experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia, mania, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, medication concerns, and ordinary worries about finances, sibling competitiveness, romantic relationships, health issues, grief, and loneliness. The new transcripts also include narratives of individuals dealing with physical disabilities, veterans struggling with PTSD, and adolescents dealing with substance abuse and other issues.
In August, Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts won a 2009 APEX Award of Excellence in the One-of-a-Kind Web & Electronic Publications category.
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:
- 14,105 CDs
- 207,509 recordings
- 15,222 scores
- 55,396 pages of full-text reference
- 365 opera and dance videos, totalling 455 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 November of 2009.
Music Listening Collections
- Higher Bitrate Streams! For all music listening collections, all new audio released will be delivered at both 128 kbps and 192 kbps. We’re investigating ways to upgrade all of our existing audio to the higher bitrates, but going forward, you can enjoy all newly released audio with this new option.
- We’ve been listening to you! After we upgraded Classical Music Library to the new interface, a number of you let us know that a few of your favorite features had changed slightly. We’ve gone back and updated the new interface to incorporate those things you told us you missed. You can now, for example, start listening to any performance directly from your browse or search results page, reducing the number of clicks it takes to navigate the collection. You can also now add recordings to playlists directly from the browse pages. Our thanks to everyone who has given us feedback and helped us to launch an interface that offers important new functionality without sacrificing any of the features you’ve come to trust and depend on. If you have any other suggestions, we’d love to hear them—email us at marketing@alexanderstreet.com.
- American Song grew by 114 albums and 1,372 recordings and now includes a total of 3,388 albums, equaling 58,837 tracks. New works include recordings from Original Blues Classics, Biograph Records, Folk Era Records, Rebel Records, Colonial Music Institute, and Starday Records. Genres of new works include blues, folk, country, and historical songs from artists such as Big Joe Williams, Lonnie Johnson, Rev. Gary Davis, Mac Wiseman, Minne Pearl, Odetta, and more. Also included in this release is a 1924 recording of George Gershwin playing “Raphsody in Blue,” and many other of his most famous compositions on rare piano rolls released by Biograph Records. Other albums just added include:
- Over the Hills and Far Away, Being a Collection of Music from 18th-Century Annapolis
- Lone Cat Sings and Plays Jazz, Folk Songs, Spirituals, and Blues
- Odetta and the Blues
- Lightnin’ Hopkins: Swarthmore Concert
- Music of the Charles Carroll Family
- We’ve added more than 721 albums to Jazz Music Library—a total of nearly 10,000 tracks! The collection now includes a total of 2,641 albums and 28,301 tracks. Works from Audiophile, Concord Records, Contemporary Records, Good Time Jazz, Jazzology Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo and Prestige Records, Prestige, and Peak Records include New Orleans Jazz, vocal jazz, bop, be-bop, hard bop, latin jazz, and cool jazz from artists/ensembles such as Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band, Cassandra Reed, Charlie Byrd, Eric Dolphy, Arnett Cobb, the Banjo Kings, Firehouse Five Plus Two, Hiram Bullock, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Karrin Allyson, Benny Carter, Etta Jones, Louie Bellson, Milt Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Zoot Sims, Shirely Horn, and more. New albums include:
- Basquiat Salutes Jazz
- Celebration of Duke
- Laurie Chescoe’s Good Time Jazz
- Ben Pollack and His Pick-a-Rib Boys
- Mucho Macho: Machito and His Afro-Cuban Salseros
- Sonny Rollins: Global Warming
- John Coltrane and the Jazz Giants
- Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band: 1944-1945, The Legendary Crescent Recording Sessions
- Arnett Cob, Dizzy Gillespie, Jews Brown: Showtime
- Charlie Byrd: The Concord Jazz Heritage Series
- Contemporary World Music grew by 226 albums totaling 3,288 tracks and now includes a total of more than 23,000 recordings. Record labels added include Black Sun, Blue Flame Records, Buda Musique, Celestial Harmonies, Fortuna, Kuckuck, Piranha, and Tropical Music. New releases include belly dance, traditional folk, afro-pop, chant, klezmer, ska, gypsy music, ambient, trance, ritual music, new age, gamelan music, worldbeat, and lounge. Examples of new albums added include:
- Music of Islam, Vol. 1: Al Qahirah Music of Cairo
- Brazilian Contemporary Instrumental Music
- Krishna Chakravarty: Circular Dance
- Many Lessons: Hiphop, Islam, West Africa
- Emil Zrihan: Ashkelon, Moroccan Mawal
- Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars: Di Shikere Kapelye, Jewish-Oriental Village Brass from NYC’s Lower East Side
- David Hudson: Art of the Didjeridu, Selected Pieces 1987-1997
- Burkina Faso: Farafina Djembe
- Michael Askill and Omar Faruk Tekbilek: Fata Morgana
- Rituales: The Afroamerindian Suite
- Pantastic World of Steel Music: Calypsoes and Soca
Our Music Reference collections have also seen a lot of growth since the last update.
- The largest and most comprehensive online scores collection available, with valuable, in-copyright, licensed scores as well as a broad range of rare archival materials, Classical Scores Library grew by 832 pages totaling 22,833 pages and now includes a total of 13,956 scores and 292,823 pages. New in-copyright scores from global contemporary music publisher Universal Edition and Faber Music include works from composers Luke Bedford, Alban Berg, Victoria Borisova-Ollas, Anne Boyd, Friedrich Cerha, Barry Conyngham, Luigi Dallapiccola, Morton Feldman, Beat Furrer, Enrique Granados, Leos Janacek, Zoltán Kodály, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Claudio Monteverdi, Modest Mussorgsky,Steve Reich, Erik Satie, Jean Sibelius, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tōru Takemitsu, Antonio Vivaldi, Anton Webern, Ian Wilson, and more.
- African American Music Reference, the only comprehensive online resource on the history of black American musical expression, grew by 10 titles totaling 3,589 pages. It now includes 3,889 essays and imgaes from 100 sources totalling more than 28,000 pages. New titles added include:
- Bird Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker by Ross Russell (Da Capo Press, 1996).
- The Bluesman: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas by Julio Finn (Quartet Books Ltd., 1986).
- Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit by Suzanne E. Smith (Harvard University Press, 1999).
- In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton (Basic Books, 2008).
- Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop by Michael Eric Dyson (Basic Civitas Books, 2007).
- The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm and Blue by Richard J. Ripani (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).
- A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and the American Popular Song by Jeffrey Melnick (Harvard University Press, 1999).
- Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War by Penny M. Von Eschen (Harvard University Press, 2004).
- Soul On Soul: The Life of Mary Lou Williams by Tammy L. Kernodle (Northeastern University Press, 2004).
- Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America by Karen Sotiropoulos (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Music Online video collections now include a total of more than 360 titles.
- The only online collection of streaming video for the enjoyment and teaching of dance performance, Dance in Video grew by 92 new video titles to a total of 233 videos totaling 175 hours. We’ve added works from the Alive and Kicking Series, the George Balanchine Foundation, and the Dance On with Billie Mahoney Series. New material includes:
- performances by the American Dance Festival Repertory Company, National Ballet of Canada, Kaeja d’Dance Company, Cullberg Ballet, Pennsylvania Dance Theatre, Dutch National Ballet, Ballet of the Teatro Alla Scala, and the Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana.
- interviews with Lavinia Williams, Vernon Fuquay, Shalom Hermon, Hikari Baba, Dai Ailian, Ayala Goren, Honi Coles, Ethel Butler, Molissa Fenley and members of the Exit Dance Theatre.
- documentaries on the Boston Dance Alliance and on the dance art of Thailand.
- coaching excerpts from the Balanchine Foundation’s Interpreters Archive and the Archive of Lost Choreography, including Maria Tallchief coaching excerpts from George Balanchine’s ‘The Nutcracker’, Allegra Kent coaching excerpts from ‘La Sonnambula’, and Frederic Franklin recreating five female solos from ‘Raymonda,’ Act III.
- The only online collection of streaming video for the enjoyment and teaching of opera performance, Opera in Video grew by a total of 69 videos and now includes a total of 132 videos totaling more than 280 hours. New videos added to the collection are from Opus Arte and the Bel Canto Society and include works such as:
- Doctor Atomic by John Adams (2007 Netherlands Opera)
- Don Carlo by Verdi (2004 Netherlands Opera)
- La Fille du Régiment by Donizetti (Royal Opera House)
- Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich (2006 Netherlands Opera)
- Marco Polo by Tan Dun (2008 Netherlands Opera)
- Saint François d’Assise by Messiaen (2008 Netherlands Opera)
- Tosca by Puccini (2004 Teatro Real)
- Il Viaggio a Reims by Rossini (2005 Kirov Opera)
- Trouble in Tahiti by Bernstein (2001 London)
Our Music Online newsletter gives you even more detailed music news and features real-world case studies of Music Online playlists used in both academic and public libraries to promote Alexander Street music collections and drive usage. Sign up here to start receiving this monthly e-mail newsletter.
Conferences We're Attending
- The 31st National Media Market: October 4-8, 2009. Lexington, KY
http://www.nmm.net
If you’re headed to NMM, be sure to attend our special presentations on Tuesday, October 6th in Embassy Suite Screening Room # 309 at 10 and 11 a.m.
Alexander Street will be doing scheduled maintenance across all collections on OCTOBER 17, 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.
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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