FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Eileen Lawrence, Alexander Street Press
800-889-5937 ext 2
lawrence@alexanderstreet.com

The Charleston Advisor, in an article by George S. Machovec, Managing Editor, in the July issue (v. 3, no. 1), reported the first TCA Readers’ Choice Best and Worst Product Awards.
The Best New Product (nominated by the Board) went to Alexander Street Press.

“Votes were taken on the TCA Website, and additional input was received from the TCA editorial board,” reports the article.

Eileen Lawrence, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, said: “We’re delighted to receive this award. The Charleston Advisor sets exacting standards and we're pleased to be recognized for meeting them.

She goes on, “Libraries have recognized our databases’ unique depth of indexing, the careful selection of content, and our ongoing interaction with scholars and librarians during the development. This award confirms what we’ve been hearing from our customers.”

In February of this year, Alexander Street launched its flagship product, North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950, the largest electronic collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled. The collection includes 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries, both in and out of copyright, plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts, all in electronic format for the first time. Represented are 1,500 women of all age groups and life stages, various ethnicities, all geographical regions, the famous and the unknown. The diaries provide a detailed record of how the women lived, worked, read, dreamed, made choices, cared for loved ones, prayed, and shared their pastimes. The third release of Women's Letters and Diaries is due in September.

In June, Alexander Street released the functional prototype of The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries. The database knits together more than 100,000 pages of diaries, memoirs, and letters, plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts in facsimile form, providing access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war. Detailed firsthand descriptions of historical characters and events, glimpses of daily life in the army, anecdotes about key events and personages, accounts of sufferings at home, a day-by-day chronology with associated writings, and a complete battles database provide an immediacy and a richness that are unmatched in public sources. The second release is due this month.

This fall, Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment will be released. The collection, which brings together hundreds of primary sources, documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. The variety of cultures in early North America was unprecedented. Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Africans, and a host of American Indian peoples developed a complex history of interactions. This collection allows scholars not only to see the effect of European cultures on Indians, but equally to explore the Indians' contributions to the Europeans. Students of natural history will have instantaneous access to hundreds of years of recorded observations. Within these collections are thousands of descriptions of lands, fauna, and flora, along with maps and illustrations reproduced to archival quality.

Also this fall, customers will see the release, in complete form, of Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period. This electronic collection of over sixty volumes of lyric poetry by Scottish women written between 1789 and 1832, fills a gap in our access to this large and comprehensive body of work. Conventional anthologies and histories of Scottish literature have been composed largely of works by male authors. Yet there were dozens of Scottish women poets who were active at the time and whose work and influence were familiar and admired by their male contemporaries. This collection presents, for the first time, a large body of poetry - not mere editorial selections, but entire volumes in electronic form - fully indexed and searchable.

In January, Alexander Street, in partnership with Ad Fontes (www.ad-fontes.com), will release The Digital Library of Classical Protestant Texts (the CPT). In the 19th century, Jacques-Paul Migne dramatically advanced theological scholarship by assembling a massive collection of Greek and Latin writings from the early Christian and medieval eras. The CPT will have a similar impact upon theological scholarship in the 21st century, by bringing together an enormous collection of Christian texts from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras - in electronic format for the first time, fully searchable and XML encoded. The database covers the works of several hundred writers, including all of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Bucer and others. Many of the books are rare. No library in this country holds even a third of them, and most have never been reprinted. There will be facsimiles, as well as selected English translations added over time. It will cover the Lutheran writers, the Reformed and Presbyterian works, and the Anabaptists and Anglicans --- more than 1,500 works in all.

Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is an academic publisher of electronic full-text databases in the humanities and social sciences. The company is developing databases in history, women’s studies, sociology, popular culture, film studies, literature, the arts, and more. Alexander Street Press is located in Alexandria, Virginia.

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For more information on Alexander Street Press and its products, contact Eileen Lawrence, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, (800) 889-5937 or lawrence@alexanderst.com, or visit http://alexanderstreetpress.com.