Contact: Eileen Lawrence
Alexander Street Press, LLC
lawrence@astreetpress.com
800-889-5937
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Alexandria, VA and Washington, D.C. – January 14, 2005)

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Alexander Street Press today announced an agreement to publish the entirety of Smithsonian Global Sound® as a streaming music service to libraries around the world. The collaboration will deliver content from archives of traditional music in South Africa and India as well as the audio collection of the U.S. national museum.

Included are music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University, material collected by recordists on the South Asian peninsula from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies, the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label, and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels—altogether an extraordinary array of more than 35,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, natural and man-made sounds—to libraries around the world.

Richard Kurin, Ph.D., Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage said, “We are enthused by the partnership with ASP. It will enable us to provide a rich Smithsonian resource—the voices of the world's people—to students and teachers across the United States and around the world.”

Smithsonian Global Sound will use the same award-winning software used for Alexander Street’s popular Classical Music Library service. Specially developed, controlled vocabularies will enable users to browse by musical instrument (e.g. aerophone, chordophone, etc.), geographic area, or cultural group, among other fields.

“We’re very happy to be working with Smithsonian Folkways on this project,” said Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President of Alexander Street Press. “Not only will Smithsonian Global Sound be a landmark listening service by itself, but the prospect of building links between our existing textual databases and these wonderful recordings is very exciting.”

The collection is an outgrowth of the vision and work of Folkways Records’ founder Moses Asch, who created a veritable encyclopedia of the human experience of sound, releasing more than 2000 albums between 1948-1986, including such legendary American folk troubadours as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger and countless influential others. The collection also encompasses animal sounds, beer-drinking at an African homestead, calypso, classical violin instruction, drama, poetry, sounds of the deep ocean, the office, the ionosphere, a frog being eaten by a snake and great performances of traditional music from virtually everywhere in the world.

“The breadth of this long-awaited collection is very impressive,” said Tim Lloyd, Vice President of Business Development at Alexander Street. “Its unique nature will make it a valuable addition to libraries that want a complete world music archive.”

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States. Dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound, we believe that musical and cultural diversity contributes to the vitality and quality of life throughout the world. For additional information on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, please contact Richard Burgess, Director of Marketing and Sales, 202-275-1129, email burgessr@si.edu, or visit www.folkways.si.edu.

Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is an academic publisher of electronic full-text databases in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in June 2000, the company publishes collections in history, literature, music, women’s studies, sociology, ethnic and diversity studies, popular culture, film studies, the arts, and other areas. Alexander Street Press is located in Alexandria, Virginia. EDITORS: For additional information on Alexander Street Press and its products, please contact Eileen Lawrence, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, 800-889-5937, email lawrence@alexanderstreet.com, or visit http://alexanderstreet.com.