Word on the Street

News on comics and Dr. Frederic Wertham

Alexander Street's Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels continues to grow and garner praise from some of the most influential publications in the comics industry. Recently, comics editor Greg Urquhart spoke with ICv2 to discuss the creation of the online collection. You can read the full article here.

Libraries are also taking notice of the collection and using it to enhance there comic book collections. The Library of Congress boasts the country's largest collection of comic books, and they recently opened the personal papers of Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham, as you'll recall, authored Seduction of the Innocent, which paved the way for the Comics Code Authority and their ban on material deemed unsuitable for the public. A great article about Wertham and the Library of Congress was just published by Washington City Paper, and can be read here.

Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels is available to libraries and academic institutions worldwide. For more information, including a free trial and price quote, please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Women and Social Movements updated

The latest issue of Women and Social Movements in the U.S. is now live. Subscribers will find a wide range of new materials—document projects, document archives, book reviews, full-text sources, and News from the Archives. If you subscribe to the Scholar's Edition, you'll also find a new secondary essay relating to the publications of State and Local Commissions on the Status of Women.

The new document projects include:

• an exploration of the contributions of African American women to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, by Professor Gail Murray
• a compelling view of the work of Catholic laywomen during, and just after, World War I to provide social services for immigrants in East St. Louis, IL, by Jeanne Petit

In the new document archive, Marcia Gallo offers a selection of issues from The Ladder, published by the Daughters of Bilitis between 1956 and 1972. In her introductory essay, Gallo discusses the founding and the evolution of the magazine and its place in the emerging lesbian and second-wave feminist movements in these years. The archive itself includes more than a thousand pages chosen to illuminate the changing approaches taken by the journal’s editors over time.

Subscribers to Women and Social Movements in the U.S. - Basic Edition can access all of the new material at http://wasm.alexanderstreet.com.

Subscribers to Women and Social Movements in the U.S. - Scholar's Edition can access all of the new material, including the secondary essay, at http://wass.alexanderstreet.com.

For more information, and to request a free trial or price quote for your institution, please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for Women and Social Movments, International.

Social Theory has been completed!

We've just uploaded the final batch of new material into Social Theory, and the collection is now complete! Social Theory now contains over 150,000 pages of material from over 400 works by 145 authors.

Newly added titles include:

• Reification: A New Look At An Old Idea by Axel Honneth
• Volume 1- Volume 4 of The Mind and Society by Alfred Pareto
• Cultural Reality and The Method Sociology by Florian Znaniecki
• Studies In the Theory of Human Society by Franklin Henry Giddings

Social Theory is available to libraries and academic institutions worldwide. For more information, and to request a free trial and price quote, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

New content added to literature collections

We've updated several of our literature collections with new titles from authors around the world. All new content is available to subscribers now in the following online collections:

• Black Women Writers - Over 4,600 pages of new content is available from authors such as Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Makeda Silvera, Tananarive Due, and others.
• Caribbean Literature - Close to 5,000 pages of new content has been added from authors hailing from Barbados, Martinique, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cuba.
• Latin American Women Writers - Over 6,500 pages of new material has been added from Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, and other countries in Latin America. Included are several volumes of the periodicals A Mensageira (Brasil), Vide Femenina (Uruguay), and Semanario de las Señoritas Mejicanes (Mexico).
• South and Southeast Asian Literature - Over 1,600 pages of new content from authors such as  Manoj Das (India), Suniti Namjoshi (India), and Siew-Yue Killingley (Malaysia).

The above collections, as well as 4 others, are available and cross-searchable through Alexander Street Literature. For more information, or to request a free trial or price quote for any of our literature collections, please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

New client narratives

Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works has recently been updated with over 6,000 pages of narratives. The entire collection currently contains over 78,000 pages  illuminating the experience of mental illness and its treatment.

Notable titles in the recent content upload include Purge: Rehab Diaries, When the Piano Stops: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse, and She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts is available to libraries, academic institutions, hospitals, and counseling training facilities worldwide. The full-text collection is the perfect companion to Counseling and Therapy in Video. For more information, and to request a free trial or price quote for your institution, please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com.

The premiere of Booklist Online Video Review

The inaugural issue of Booklist Online Video Review hit in-boxes today. Video Review is "a bimonthly digital newsletter featuring new reviews of videos for adults and youth. Booklist’s video coverage is an essential resource for public and school librarians . . ." The first issue of this free e-newsletter can be viewed here, and you'll want to be sure to subscribe.

If you've already read issue #1, you'll notice the advertisements for free access to Alexander Street's American History in Video. Our free access periods have been so popular that we've decided to do it one more time! Check Video Review for more details and start streaming today.

New MARC records sets available

Four new sets of MARC records have just been uploaded to http://marc.alexanderstreet.com. The new record sets include:

• Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels - This is the first set of book-level records for this collection, and it includes 133 records in MARC8 format.
• Black Short Fiction and Folkore, supplement 3 - This file includes 5 records representing 145 links to periodical sources.
• Contemporary World Music - The first set of records for this streaming audio collection includes 504 records representing 529 albums. This set is intended for customers in the U.S. and Canada only.
• Contemporary World Music, supplement 1 - This supplemental set includes 434 records representing 446 albums, and is intended for customers in the U.S. and Canada only.

Additionally, we've released several new lists of titles with URLs linking directly into our collections. Newly added title lists include:

• American Song (for customers outside of the U.S. and Canada)
• Classical Music Library (for customers outside of the U.S. and Canada)
• Classical Music Library (EMI titles available in select countries. Please view the spreadsheet for a complete list of territories where EMI content is currently available.)
• Jazz Music Library (for customers outside of the U.S. and Canada)
• Contemporary World Music (for customers outside of the U.S. and Canada)
• Smithsonian Global Sound^® for Libraries
• Alexander Street Literature
• Black Short Fiction and Folklore
• Black Women Writers
• Caribbean Literature
• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• Latin American Women Writers
• Latino Literature
• The Romantic Era Redefined
• Scottish and Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• South and Southeast Asian Literature
• Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works

We will continue to produce MARC records for the collections listed above, but in the meantime the title lists are available at http://marc.alexandestreet.com.

Scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 18

On Saturday, September 18, 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.

Using Civil War collections for genealogy research

Civil War buffs and historians love Alexander Street's online collections for their rare content and powerful search capabilities. But our Civil War collections are also a useful tool for genealogy research. Jirene's Genealogy Tips highlights a few of the ways you can find information on ancestors that served in The War Between The States.

National HBCU Week

This week has officially been designated National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week by President Obama. The proclamation is intended to raise awareness and support the efforts of the 105 HBCUs in the US. You can learn more by reading the official White House press release.

Today Alexander Street is attending the Howard University Faculty Open House, and all week we're offering free content that celebrates National HBCU Week. To see a video clip discussing Thurgood Marshall's education at Howard Law School under Charles Houston, and for future free content, visit our Facebook page and look for the Afternoon Snack.