Word on the Street

Fall review roundup

It's been a busy Fall full of rave reviews and awards for Alexander Street online collections.

• Music Online and American History in Video have both won Booklist 2009 Editors' Choice Best Reference Awards.
• In their December 2009 review of Counseling and Therapy in Video, Library Journal says, "The content here is astonishingly deep, broad, and expert, as well as unique, and you are not going to find anything even remotely similar online. . . . A highly effective tool that rates a strong ten." (Read the full review.)
• American History in Video earned a starred review from Booklist in November, 2009. (Read the full review.)
• Booklist says "Music Online is the LexisNexis of music, and it may make the use of many traditional library resources unnecessary" in a November 2009 starred review. (Read the full review.)
• Counseling and Therapy in Video "highly recommended" by CHOICE in their October 2009 review. (Read the full review.)
• In an October 2009 review of American History in Video, CHOICE says, "The database’s information architecture is the best this reviewer has seen in a commercial database." (Read the full review.)

You can see all of these reviews, with links to the full text, on our Web site at http://alexanderstreet.com/pressroom/media/index.htm.

If you are a reviewer and would like more information about any of our online collections, please contact Meg Keller, Director of Marketing.

Librarians and faculty looking for pricing or trial information should contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Women and Social Movements: The Online Discussion

Fans of Women and Social Movements in the United States will be excited to learn of the new online forum for discussions of teaching and research in U.S. women's history. Women and Social Movements: The Online Discussion is directed and managed by a group of historians, including Laura Westhoff of the University of Missouri - St. Louis, Carol Lasser of Oberlin College, and SUNY Binghamton professors and Women and Social Movements editors Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar.

The Online Discussion welcomes participation from students and historians, and seeks to enhance research and teaching through conversations about current practices, especially the use of online resources.

Join the discussion now at http://wasmblog.binghamton.edu/.

For more information on Women and Social Movements in the United States, including pricing and trial requests for your library, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Think you know The Sixties?

Our online collection The Sixties has recently been updated with over 9,000 pages from 430 sources. The new content includes issues of several underground newspapers, including AMEX-Canada, Booklegger Magazine, Despite Everything, Fifth Estate, Free Student, The Paper, The Rag, The Partisan, Sanity, and The Vanguard.

Also included are materials from the radical right, such as The Truth Seeker and newsletters written by Americans for Conservative Action and American Association for Justice.

Newly added materials from the radical left include documents and papers by Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Liberation Movement.

All of the recently added content can be seen on the What's New page of the collection.

In a bit of licensing news, Alexander Street has secured the rights to publish the full line of Ramparts magazine in The Sixties! Ramparts had a tumultuous run from 1962 to 1975 and broke several major stories on U.S. policies in Vietnam and C.I.A. activities. Time magazine once published an article on Ramparts with the headline "A Bomb in Every Issue." Subscribers to The Sixties can look for the content to be added later in 2010.

For more information on The Sixties, including trial and pricing requests for your library, please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

MARC records update for video collections

While we're waiting for the MARC records for Alexander Street's online video collections, our MARC records team has been able to provide an Excel spreadsheet for each collection listing every video title currently available together with the permanent URL for each. A number of libraries have asked for this, and we hope it helps your library improve findability for these videos while we wait for the MARC records to be completed.

To access the Excel files, please go to http://marc.alexanderstreet.com and scroll to the bottom of the page. The files are listed under "Video Collection Title/URL Lists."

The MARC records for our video collections are at the top of our priority list, and we hope to have them ready early in 2010. We're also working with OCLC to get our MARC records loaded into WorldCat, so you should start seeing our records appear there in 2010 as well.

New MARC records released

Earlier this month we released several new sets of MARC records, which are available for download now at http://marc.alexanderstreet.com. The new sets include:

• Women and Social Movements: Scholar's Edition — The first set of book-level records for this collection contains 178 records for the Scholar's Edition only. Please be aware that there are separate sets of records for the Basic Edition and the Scholar's Edition.
• Caribbean Literature — Two new sets of records have been created to replace both of the previous sets. The updated record sets fix errors contained in the previous sets.
• Classical Music Library — Two new sets of records have been created. The first is a replacement set for the previous version, and contains 350 records. It has been tested and found to work with all currently updated, standard systems. The second set is a brand-new supplementary set, containing 127 additional records that have never been released. More information about both of the Classical Music Library sets can be found here.
• Jazz Music Library — The product-level record is now available.

We'll keep you posted as more MARC record sets are released.

Remembering Claude Lévi-Strauss

By now you may have heard that French anthropologist and sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away on October 30th. Often called "the father of modern anthropology," Lévi-Strauss was an important structuralism theorist. His theories are presented in Structural Anthropology, both volumes of which are available in Alexander Street's online collection Social Theory. The complete text of Elementary Structures of Kinship is also available in Social Theory.

In addition to his own works, Claude Lévi-Strauss is discussed in the works of others, including Communication and the Evolution of Society by Jürgen Habermas and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign by Jean Baudrillard.

Social Theory is available to libraries and academic institutions via annual subscription or a one-time purchase of perpetual rights. For more information, or to request a free trial, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Music Online is going mobile!

What's better than hundreds of thousands of audio recordings, videos, scores, and pages of full-text music reference?  How about accessing it all on the go?

In 2010 Alexander Street's entire music portfolio will be accessible on iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices. Subscribers will be able to stream music and video, access scores, search and navigate full-text reference content, and even access and edit personal playlists.

Alexander Street's iPhone and iPod Touch application will be completely free. Updating your playlists or listening to an assigned recording will literally be just a touch away. And thanks to newly developed streaming technology, you'll do it all without buffering.

Look for Alexander Street's iPhone app in 2010 on our Web site, on this blog, and through the iTunes store.

 

Scheduled Maintenance - October 17th

A reminder that we'll be performing scheduled maintenance on Saturday, October 17, 2009 from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM EDT/GMT-5.

We do not expect any disruptions to your service, but please note the work schedule above. If you experience persistent problems during this time, or any issues after our scheduled maintenance window, please email Customer Support.

Updates to The American Civil War Research Database®

Already named the "Best Reference Database of 2008" by Library Journal, The American Civil War Research Database® has been updated with 100,000 new data points!

New data recently added to the online collection include:

• 8,000 soldiers' date or year of birth
• 4,500 soldiers' birth place
• 10,500 soldiers' post war date or year of death
• 15,000 soldiers' burial location
• tens of thousands of other new data details about individuals, regiments, and battles
• 330 new regimental histories
• 1,200 new soldiers' photographs

You can learn more about the entire collection and other Civil War collections on our Web site. To request a free trial or pricing information for your library, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

New content added to Women and Social Movements

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 has been updated with a new document project, document archive, and review essays devoted to women and social movements in Canada. The collection now includes 92 document projects/archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors.

Additionally, the Scholar's Edition has been updated with the final release of Commissions on the Status of Women between 1961 and 2005. The Scholar's Edition now includes over 90,000 pages of publications by local, state, and federal commissions.

Women and Social Movements in the United States is available to libraries and academic institutions through annual subscription or one-time purchase of perpetual rights. To request a free trial or price quote, email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

(This graph appears in Women and Social Movements in the US: Scholar's Edition)