Word on the Street

New therapy transcripts and client narratives

More than 4,000 pages of new material have just been added to Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works. This includes approximately 2,000 pages of therapy session transcripts, and approximately 2,000 pages of client narratives, bringing the total number of pages in the collection to almost 72,000.

New client narratives of interest include:

• Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (author of Sophie's Choice). This memoir details Styron's struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies.
• Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. A memoir of Kaysen's hospitalization as a teen for Borderline Personality Disorder.
• Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater. The renowned psychologist discusses her own experiences with Prozac, which she credits with solving many problems and creating others.

If your library subscribes to Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts you can see all of the new material right now. If your library does not subscribe, you can still browse the list of titles at http://psyc.alexanderstreet.com, or contact sales@alexanderstreet.com to request a free trial or price quote.

Scheduled maintenance on February 27

Please be aware that we will be performing scheduled maintenance on Saturday, February 27 from 8 AM to 4 PM EST/GMT-5. While we do not expect major downtime to occur, access to your online collections may be disrupted briefly. We do not expect service interruptions to last more than 15 minutes. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any questions, or if you experience problems after the scheduled maintenance window, please email Customer Support.

American History in Video earns more praise

American History in Video was recently named one of the 100 most informative video collections on the Web for 2009 by OnlineUniversities.com. The entire list, organized by discipline, can be seen here. American History in Video is listed at #47 under Politics and History.

Learn more about American History in Video here, or email sales@alexanderstreet.com to request a free trial or price quote for your library.

Alexander Street partnering with NINES

Alexander Street is partnering with Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.

Their aim:

• Serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long nineteenth-century (1770-1920), British and American
• Support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials
• Develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.

The NINES Collex interface is at the center of these efforts. It aims to gather the best scholarly resources in the field and make them fully searchable and interoperable; and to provide an online collecting and authoring space in which researchers can create and publish their own work.

We’re pleased to announce that several core Alexander Street Press nineteenth century collections are now searchable via the NINES site, including:

• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• Coming soon, we will add The Romantic Era Redefined.

These Alexander Street collections are now completely cross-searchable within the NINES interface. Access to Alexander Street search results at the document level are available only to institutions subscribing to the collections, but NINES users are able to view contextual snippets.

To give you some sense of the scope of the project, here’s a saved search showing all of our Civil War Letters and Diaries material: http://www.nines.org/search/saved?user=DWheeles&name=cwld.

Alexander Street joins ProQuest, JSTOR, and many other leading publishers in indexing important nineteenth-century primary materials through the NINES project—it’s just one of the things we’re doing to ensure that scholars can find and access these important primary materials.

New content added to American History in Video

American History in Video was recently updated with 8 new hours of streaming video from 9 new titles. The newly added titles come from our documentary partner Media Rich Learning and their America in the 20th Century series. The entire series, covering 9 eras of American life, is available in American History in Video, and Media Rich Learning specializes in documentaries aligned to US History standards and curricula. Subscribers can see all of the new items uploaded in February in a playlist at http://ahiv.alexanderstreet.com/Playlists/331068.

American History in Video currently contains 1,027 hours of streaming video from 4,163 titles. For more information, and to request a free trial or price quote for your library, email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Music Online to triple in size!

All of our music listening (in streaming audio) collections will nearly triple in size over the course of 2010, growing from our current total of nearly 263,000 recordings to more than 720,000 by December of this year.* Online collections that will see huge increases in numbers of recordings—without a price increase—include:

• Classical Music Library (http://clmu.alexanderstreet.com) will grow from roughly 64,000 to approximately 155,000 recordings
• Jazz Music Library (http://jazz.alexanderstreet.com) will grow from roughly 60,000 to approximately 122,000 recordings
• American Song (http://amso.alexanderstreet.com) will grow from roughly 69,000 to approximately 114,000 recordings
• Contemporary World Music (http://womu.alexanderstreet.com) will grow from roughly 28,000 to approximately 196,000 recordings
• Subscribers to the entire Music Online Listening package (which includes the four collections above as well as Smithsonian Global Sound® for Libraries) will see their number of recordings increase by an additional 140,000 popular music recordings. New popular music content will include a wide mix of genres, from children’s music, to new age, film soundtracks, hip-hop/rap, electronic, and rock with artists such as Tonya Tucker, a Flock of Seagulls, Donna Summer, Edith Piaf, Chicago, Iggy Pop, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Liberace, and many more.

Other planned improvements to Music Online Listening collections in 2010:

• Improved bit rates and sound quality levels. Going forward, every recording added to Music Online will be available at 320 kbps; by 2011, this higher level will be available for every recording in Music Online.
• Mobile access to all Music Online listening collections: Later in 2010 we’ll release iPhone and other applications that let users stream Music Online listening content on the go!
• Lower prices for several individual online listening collections will make it easier for small libraries who can’t afford package subscriptions to purchase the individual collections of most interest to them. We’re also offering special pricing to all first-time Music Online customers. Contact sales@alexanderstreet.com for a price quote.

* Number of recordings available to US and Canadian customers will differ from those available to customers in the rest of the world. Contact us for more information.

Special sneak peek access to Audio Drama

Alexander Street and the creators of the critically acclaimed public radio series “The Play’s the Thing,” have just launched Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection, an exciting new e-resource that lets you listen to hundreds of the world’s best plays online in streaming audio. Optional downloads enable easy listening on the go!*

Listen to plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman, David Mamet, Carson McCullers, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Simon, Sam Shepard, Oscar Wilde, and dozens of original docudramas.

Access it now, registration-free, through Friday, February 12th.
 
URL: http://radr.alexanderstreet.com
 
username: audiodrama
 
password: sneakpeek

World-famous performers include Alan Alda, Ed Asner, Jacqueline Bisset, Margaret Cho, Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Dreyfuss, Laurence Fishburne, Teri Garr, James Gleason, Jeff Goldblum, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Guest, Helen Hunt, Walter Matthau, Leonard Nimoy, George Segal, Jennifer Tilly, Jobeth Williams, to name just a few.
 
The collection’s teaching guides and critical essays make this a powerful teaching tool across the curriculum (see how the University of Maryland’s School of Law is using it here.) And it has already become quite popular with libraries such as Reinhardt College's Hill Freeman Library & Spruill Learning Center.

Learn more about Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection here, or request a price quote or an institution-wide trial by emailing sales@alexanderstreet.com.
 
* Download option available with paid subscription.

This is a special sneak peak opportunity due to the interdisciplinary nature of this new streaming audio collection. If you are a librarian or faculty member and would like to receive sneak peek access to forthcoming online collections, you can join our mailing list here.

Two Alexander Street collections earn top honor from Booklist

Every January, Booklist editors select the previous year's top reference titles. Two Alexander Street online collections were chosen for the 2009 award: American History in Video and Music Online. Both collections were praised for being comprehensive and easy to use. Booklist subscribers can read the American History in Video starred review here, and the starred review of Music Online here.

To request a price quote or free trial for your library, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Free subscription winners from ALA Midwinter

Last month at ALA, we held drawings for free subscriptions at each of our five advisory roundtables, and at our booth in the exhibit hall. We'd like to thank everyone that attended our ALA events and entered our drawings and, as always, we appreciate your feedback and support.

And now, your 2010 ALA Midwinter winners.

• Hung Lee, Rock Valley College - Jazz Music Library
• Christina Smith, Boston university - Ethnographic Video Online
• Rosalind Tedford, Wake Forest University - American History in Video
• Donna Capelle Cook, Tulane University - Women and Social Movements, International
• Chad Curtis, New York University - Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels
• Ryan Johnson, University of Mississippi - Ethnographic Video Online

Thanks again and be sure to attend our events at the ALA Annual meeting in Washington, DC for more chances to win a free subscription for your library.

New MARC record sets available

We've just released three new sets of item-level MARC records for our streaming music collections, as well as an updated product-level record for Images of America: A History of American Life in Images and Texts.

The first sets of item-level records records are now available for Jazz Music Library and American Song, and we've released the third supplementary set for Classical Music Library. Each set includes records in UTF8 and MARC 8 formats.

All records, and a revised schedule of releases, can be downloaded at http://marc.alexanderstreet.com.