Word on the Street

Advisory Roundtables at ALA

If you're heading to ALA in Washington, D.C., why not give our editors 45 minutes of your time at one of our advisory roundtable sessions? Our editors host these informal gatherings in order to get feedback and suggestions on new and forthcoming collections. We're hosting five different sessions, and all are conveniently located at the convention center or in ALA hotels no more than 2 blocks away. In exchange for your time we'll give you the opportunity to win a one-year subscription.

Join us at one or more of the following:

• Alexander Street’s Comics and Graphic Novels Roundtable
• What’s New in Alexander Street Video
• “On the Couch” with Alexander Street: Counseling and Therapy Advisory Roundtable
• Going Global: Alexander Street’s History in Video Advisory Roundtable
• Alexander Street’s Music Advisory Roundtable

You can learn more about all five session and RSVP here.

And don't forget to stop by booth #3813 in the exhibit hall!

Scheduled maintenance on Saturday, May 29

On Saturday, May 29, 2010, we will be performing scheduled maintenance on all Alexander Street collections. While we do not expect any major service outages, access may be disrupted sporadically between the hours of 8 AM and 4 PM EDT / UTC-4.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. As always, we'll try to keep any periods of downtime to a minimum, but please plan accordingly.

If you have any questions prior to the scheduled maintenance, or if you experience problems after the times listed above, please contact Customer Support. If you are the technical contact at your library and would like to receive email notifications about future service interruptions, please sign up here.

LJ webcast available on-demand

Our May 4 Library Journal webcast "Video in the Library: Trends and Best Practices" has been archived and is available on-demand at http://libraryjournal.com/lj/tools/webcast/883880-388/video___in_the.html.csp. If you missed the live broadcast, watch it now!

We've also just posted the Q&A from the webcast and a list of resources for further learning on our Web site.

For free trial access or a price quote for any Alexander Street video collection, email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Scheduled maintenance on Saturday, May 22

On Saturday, May 22, 2010, we will be performing scheduled maintenance on all Alexander Street collections. While we do not expect any major service outages, access may be disrupted sporadically between the hours of 8 AM and 4 PM EDT / UTC-4.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. As always, we'll try to keep any periods of downtime to a minimum, but please plan accordingly.

If you have any questions prior to the scheduled maintenance, or if you experience problems after the times listed above, please contact Customer Support. If you are the technical contact at your library and would like to receive email notifications about future service interruptions, please sign up here.

Undergound and Independent Comics is live!

Our newest online collection, Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels is now live. Quickly growing to include more than 75,000 pages of primary materials and 25,000 pages of interviews, criticism, and journal articles, Underground and Independent Comics is the first-ever scholarly, primary-source collection dedicated to the study of adult comic books and graphic novels.

Access the collection now, registration free, through Friday May 21st!

URL - http://comx.alexanderstreet.com
username: comics
password: sneakpeek

Beginning with the works that inspired the first underground comix from the 1960s and encompassing modern sequential artists such as Dan Clowes and Los Bros. Hernandez, Underground and Independent Comics shows the evolution and development of an art form. From the shocking and explicit work of young artists exploring newfound freedoms to intricate and beautiful designs of aesthetic craftsmanship, the comic book has shown itself to be a medium capable of both the offensive and the sublime.
 
Comics have become an increasingly popular area of academic study, and yet the typical library has only a small selection of graphic novels in the catalog. Underground and Independent Comics solves this problem, collecting thousands of comics—many extremely rare and hard to find—in one, easy-to-use online collection.
 
Included are influential works of visionaries such as Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman; underground artists including Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, and Vaughn Bode; and modern masters such as Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, and Dave Sim. The collection includes original material from the 1950s to today along with interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.

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

MARC record news and releases

In addition to being available at http://marc.alexanderstreet.com, Alexander Street's MARC records are also being made available through OCLC WorldCat. As we add records to our site, they are automatically sent to OCLC, where they are processed and posted. Please note that there may be some lag time between when the records are posted on the Alexander Street site and when they are available through OCLC.

For libraries that would like to add the OCLC number to their Alexander Street MARC records, you can download spreadsheets containing the OCLC keys from our Web site here.

OCLC's WorldCat Collection sets are also now available on the OCLC site here.  OCLC keys for these sets are published on our Web site here.

Newly added record sets from Alexander Street include:

• Images of America — The first set of book-level records for this collection contains 750 records representing 750 books. As Images of America grows, supplemental MARC record sets will be released.
• Classical Music Library, Supplement 5 — The file includes 879 records representing 1,092 albums. Records are available in both MARC8 and UTF8 formats. To date, we have released 2,740 records representing 3,279 albums for Classical Music Library.
• Classical Scores Library — The first set of records for this collection, the file includes 561 records representing 600 scores. The records are available in both MARC8 and UTF8 formats.
• Black Short Fiction and Folklore, Supplement 2 — The new file includes 23 records representing 162 links to sources. To date, we have released 297 records with 442 links for this collection.
• Black Women Writers, Supplement 2 — This file includes 59 records. To date, we have released 261 records with links to 262 sources.
• Latin American Women Writers, Supplement 1 — The first supplement file for this collection contains 21 records, linking to 21 sources. To date, we've released 295 records with links to 301 sources.
• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, Supplement 2 — This file contains 45 records linking to 45 sources. To date, we've released 140 records with 142 links for this collection.
• South and Southeast Asian Literature, Supplement 2 — This file contains 84 records with links to 84 sources. To date, we've released 225 with links to 226 sources.

To download these sets and others, and to download the OCLC number keys, please visit http://marc.alexanderstreet.com.

Coming soon - World History in Video

The latest streaming video collection from Alexander Street, World History in Video: English-Language Documentaries will give faculty, students, and history lovers access to more than 1,750 important, critically acclaimed documentaries from filmmakers worldwide. A rich survey of human history from the earliest civilizations to the fall of the Berlin Wall, World History in Video is truly global in scope, covering Africa and the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Its unparalleled geographical and chronological coverage delivers the sights, sounds, artifacts, and histories from around the world straight to your desktop.

Learn more about World History in Video and sign up now for sneak peek access to the collection as soon as it's launched.

New Music Media Monthly blog launched

Sponsored by Alexander Street, Music Media Monthly is "your guide to the best recent (and sometimes not-so-recent) sound recordings, music-related books, videos, and Web sites.”  The blog is independently edited by Rick Anderson of the University of Utah's Marriott Library, and is designed to be a resource for music and media librarians, music students and teaching faculty, and music lovers.

Read the inaugural issue now at http://musicmediamonthly.com, and be sure to subscribe to the blog's RSS feed or bookmark the URL in your Web browser. You can also read the press release here.

New content added to The Sixties

The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 has recently been updated with over 2,000 new pages of content. Included in this latest upload are 15 new titles.

We continue to add new issues of the Berkeley Barb, and The Sixties now contains over 500 issues. We've also added memoirs by civil rights activists Stokely Carmichael and Daisy Bates. Subscribers can see a complete list of all the newly added material here.

Several of the featured items on the home page are about the Kent State University shootings. Yesterday, May 4th, was the 40th anniversary of the tragic event, and it's worth taking a look at some of the documents in The Sixties. You'll find interviews, a chronology of the day's events, and more.

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