Word on the Street

New music content added

This was a big week for our music products: we've added a lot of content to four different collections!

• 1,837 pages of content have been added to Classical Music Reference Library, representing four titles from Princeton University Press (if this month's issue of Music Media Monthly got you in a Schoenberg mood, you're in luck: one of those titles is Schoenberg and His World).
• 28 videos have been added to Dance in Video, with styles ranging from baroque to hip-hop. Dance in Video now contains 275 hours of video from 314 different titles.
• 18 new videos have been added to Opera in Video, including a number of performances from the Royal Opera House and several documentaries. The collection now contains 174 videos spanning 488 hours. 
• The biggest news of all: Classical Scores Library is now complete! The new content added to the collection (from composers like Girolamo Frescobaldi, Antonio Vivaldi, and Diana Blom) puts it at 400,000 pages of sheet music.

For more information about any of our music and performing arts collections, or to request a free trial or price quote for your library, email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Listen for three times as long!

Last month, we did something huge: we tripled the size of our Music Online collection. You read that right: tripled. We added more than 400,000 new recordings to individual libraries, including 46,000 tracks into American Song, 61,000 tracks into Jazz Music Library, and 132,000 tracks into Contemporary World Music. We also added something entirely new, just for subscribers to the complete Music Online—Listening suite: nearly 140,000 recordings of 20th century popular music, including pop, punk, hip-hop, country, and musical theater.

We've also increased search speeds and functionality, and we've improved sound quality. We're not done yet: expect that track number to grow even more throughout this year!

For full details, visit our website to read the press release and learn more about Music Online.

Updates to Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection

 60 new plays have been added to Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection! This update brings Audio Drama to 241 plays; when complete, it will have 300 plays, and additional scene-level indexing will be coming in 2011. Some of the new additions include:

• Neil Simon's Barefoot In The Park, starring Eric Stoltz and Laura Linney
• Molière's The Misanthrope starring Kevin Gudahl, Hollis Resnik, and Harry Althaus
• Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest starring James Marsters
• Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde starring Simon Templeman
• Shakespeare's Pericles
• Moss Hart's Light Up the Sky

Also new with this update is Send To Mobile functionality! Now you can take the collection with you by streaming works directly to your mobile device.

Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection is available to libraries and educational institutions worldwide. For more information, including free trial and pricing requests, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Black Drama: Second Edition is complete

Over 80 new plays have been added to Black Drama: Second Edition, bringing this online collection to completion. A 2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, the collection now contains more than 1,460 plays written by authors from North America, the Caribbean, English-speaking Africa, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the plays in Black Drama: Second Edition are rare, and over 40% are previously unpublished.

Highlights of the latest content update include the unpublished works of:

• George Houston Bass (founder of the Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown University)
• Mustapha Matura
• Paul Boakye
• Kia Corthron
• Gus Edwards
• J.E. Franklin
• Edgar White
• Charlayne Woodard
• Marion McClinton (renowned director of August Wilson's work)

Also included in this final release are plays by:

• Aime Cesaire
• Trevor Rhone
• Roderick Walcott (twin brother of Derek Walcott)
• Austin Bukenya
• Caryl Phillips
• Sterling Houston
• Wole Soyinka

Black Drama: Second Edition is available to libraries and academic institutions worldwide. For more information, including pricing and free trial requests, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

New MARC record sets available

New MARC record sets from Alexander Street are available, free of charge, at http://marc.alexanderstreet.com. Newly added sets include:

• Women and Social Movements in the US: Basic Edition, supplement 1 — The first supplemental set for the Basic Edition, this file contains 91 records representing 98 books and pamphlets.
• Women and Social Movements in the US: Scholar's Edition, supplement 2 — This file includes 91 records representing 98 books and pamphlets in the Scholar's Edition.
• Classical Scores Library, supplement 2 — This file contains 1,699 records representing 1,700 scores.
• Images of America, supplement 1 — This first supplemental set includes 465 records representing 465 books.
• Opera in Video, supplement 1 — This set contains 105 records representing 106 works.

All MARC record sets listed above are in MARC8 format. In addition to these supplemental sets, we've also released a title/URL list for Contemporary World Music customers outside of the United States and Canada. For more information and an updated release schedule, visit http://marc.alexanderstreet.com.

New performances in Theatre in Video

US and Canadian subscribers to Theatre in Video will notice that the online collection was recently updated with 23 new titles. The newly added films come from the Broadway Theatre Archive and include works by Edward Albee, Jean Anouilh, Eugene O’Neill, Lanford Wilson, Arthur Miller, William Saroyan, Neil Simon, Anton Chekhov, Thornton Wilder, and Wendy Wasserstein, among others.

Featured actors include Geraldine Fitzgerald, Linda Hunt, Meryl Streep, Alfre Woodard, John Lithgow, Jeff Daniels, Faye Dunaway, Kevin Kline, Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, Olympia Dukakis, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Keitel, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Ralph Richardson.

Titles include Death of a Salesman, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Time of Your Life, Uncommon Women and Others, The Seagull, An Enemy of the People, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, Fifth of July, The Good Doctor, and The Pirates of Penzance.

Customers outside of the US and Canada will see these films added to the collection shortly. For more information on Theatre in Video, and to request a free trial or price quote for your library, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

New performing arts videos licensed from the BBC

 Libraries with access to Opera in Video and Dance in Video will be pleased to learn that we've just licensed some exciting titles from the BBC.

Opera in Video will soon be updated with concert arias sung by Cecilia Bartoli, Anna Netrebko, Joan Sutherland, Karita Mattila, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Renee Fleming, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Angela Gheorghiu, and others. Also licensed are excerpts of performances from the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.

Opera in Video will also soon include full-length operas from the BBC, including The Cunning Little Vixen, Rigoletto, The Magic Flute, Il Trovatore, Falstaff, and Der Vampyr, plus Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Gondoliers. 

BBC titles to be added to Dance in Video include performances by the Cuban National Ballet, Royal Ballet, Kirov Ballet, and the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet.

Opera in Video and Dance in Video are available to libraries worldwide, either through annual subscription or one-time purchase. The newly licensed BBC videos will not initially be available in all countries, so please email sales@alexanderstreet.com for more information.

Using Theatre in Video for teaching and research

In the latest issue of Brock University's Library News, the newsletter of the James A. Gibson Library, Dr. David Fancy discusses his use of Theatre in Video in the classroom and for research. The interview is embedded below, and you can use the controls in the toolbar to zoom in. You can also find the entire newsletter online at http://issuu.com/brocklibrary/docs/newsletterwinter2010.

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.

Music Online cross-search is live

The broadest and most comprehensive digital music resource available, Music Online now lets you cross-search audio, video, scores, and full-text reference content through a single interface.

The hundreds of thousands of cross-searchable items in Music Online include more than 88,000 tracks; 285 hours of dance and opera video; more than 13,000 scores; and more than 45,000 pages of reference content from dozens of different record and video labels, print and score publishers, including EMI, Boosey & Hawkes, Garland, Rounder Records, Rebel, Arhoolie Records, Verve, Arabesque Recordings, Smithsonian Folkways, Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, and Opus Arte.

The continuously growing collection also makes cross-searchable thousands of liner notes, biographies, and images. In May, Music Online will expand to include 20,000 jazz recordings. By September, all of the content in both African American Music and Smithsonian Global Sound® for Libraries will also be cross-searchable though the new interface.

We’re activating customers for the new Music Online service over the next few days, so keep your eyes open for your activation notice.

To learn more about Music Online, visit our Web site. You can also contact us to request free trial and pricing information.

Read the full press release here.