Eileen Lawrence, Alexander Street Press, 800-889-5937
lawrence@alexanderst.com
John Ober, California Digital Library, (510) 987-0425
john.ober@ucop.edu

The California Digital Library (CDL) has chosen Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., to provide University of California students and scholars with important electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences. This is the second system-wide acquisition of Alexander Street products by the CDL. The full-text databases acquired are Black Drama; Asian American Drama; and Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment. These collections will be accessible to all students, faculty, and staff on the ten campuses of the University of California (UC). The agreement marks continuing success in collaboration and co-investment among the campus libraries to benefit the entire University of California system.

“Alexander Street Press is delighted by the CDL’s decision to make these important collections accessible to students and faculty at UC member institutions,” said Stephen Rhind-Tutt, president of Alexander Street, when announcing the agreement. “We have pledged that our databases will bring value far beyond mere digitization, applying our Semantic Indexing to broadly defined collections. The UC System has recognized the added value we are offering to their users.”

Eileen Lawrence, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, adds, “Black Drama and Asian American Drama will bring the UC community more than 1,500 plays, many of which have never been published before, by Asian American writers and black playwrights from around the world. Early Encounters in North America will provide new ways of researching ethnohistory, Indian studies, natural history, literature, and geography. We are excited by the possibilities that these resources open up for the UC community.”

"Alexander Street’s databases in the humanities are significant resources for UC's scholars and students," said Beverlee French, CDL's director for shared content. "The CDL and its campus partners are thrilled to expand digital resources in this area and provide the associated enhanced access and convenience to the UC community."

Black Drama integrates 1,200 rare and hard-to-find plays written from the 1850s to the present by Africans and African-Americans in North America, English-speaking Africa, Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries. The Harlem Renaissance, the Federal Theatre Project, the Black Arts movement, South African Township Theater, and many other movements are covered. Nearly a quarter of the plays have never been published before. Hundreds of images (posters, playbills, manuscripts) are included. There are rich performance and theater databases. Among the playwrights included are Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. DuBois, William Wells Brown, Owen Dodson, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Randolph Edmonds, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ed Bullins, Phillip Hayes Dean, Thomas Pawley, Ted Shine, Aishah Rahman, Paul Carter Harrison, David Edgecombe, Una Marson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jimmi Makotsi, Femi Osofisan, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Duro Lapido, ‘Zulu Sofola, and many others. Countries include the US and UK, Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, The West Indies, Australia, and other parts of the world.

Asian American Drama brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information. The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and progresses to the writings of contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. The plays have relevance well beyond the study of literature, drama, and Asian American studies, presenting views of important historical events, such as the construction of the railroads in the nineteenth century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Vietnam conflict. Approximately half the plays have never been published before.

Painstakingly assembled from hundreds of sources, Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment documents the relationships among the many various groups in North America between 1534 and 1865. 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. Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Africans, and a host of Indian peoples developed a complex history of interactions. This collection allows scholars to see the effect of European cultures on Indians and 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. There are 1,200 maps and illustrations reproduced to archival quality.

In all three databases, Alexander Street Press has applied their Semantic Indexing to the data, using SGML markup, newly created thesaurus lists, and hundreds of index fields. There are a variety of search screens with multiple fields, plus a number of unique text analysis tools. Users can ask questions never before possible in an electronic database. Queries will quickly produce large sets of search results that would otherwise have taken years or been impossible.

The California Digital Library (http://www.cdlib.org/), which partners with the 10 UC campuses in a continuing commitment to apply innovative technology to managing scholarly information, opened to the public in January 1999. Organizationally housed at the UC Office of the President in Oakland, Calif., the CDL provides a centralized framework to efficiently share materials held by UC, to provide greater and easier access to digital content, and to join with researchers in developing new tools and innovations for scholarly communication. University of California campuses include UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced.

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

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Editors: For additional information on the CDL please contact

John Ober, CDL director for education & strategic innovation, (510) 987-0425; or John.Ober@ucop.edu. Additional information about the California Digital Library may be found at the CDL web site, http://www.cdlib.org .

For more information on Alexander Street Press and its products, contact Eileen Lawrence, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, (800) 889-5937 or lawrence@alexanderstreet.com.