New Database from Alexander Street Press

At ALA, we announced a new Alexander Street resource – and it’s
FREE! It’s called In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries,
Oral Histories, and Other Personal Narratives. You can start using
it right now at:
http://www.cochran.sbc.edu/databases/splash/firstperson.html

I’m writing to ask you to try this important new resource, tell
colleagues about it, and be sure that it’s added to the library’s
list of available databases as soon as possible.

In the First Person is a new library index that lets users perform
in-depth field and keyword searches across all letters, diaries,
oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies within scholarly
materials that are freely available on the Web and Alexander Street
databases. With a single search, users can access thousands of
personal narratives in English from archives and repositories
everywhere. The search returns citation information and links to
full text, audio, and video whenever available.

Every imaginable topic, historical event, and person is covered,
from World War I and II to popular culture, music to medicine,
Hitler to John Wayne, gay rights to September 11th. It’s the most
comprehensive archive of social memory yet created—a one-stop
starting point for historians, sociologists, genealogists,
linguists, and psychologists who want to find, explore, and analyze
human experiences. And it will be updated quarterly.

The first release of In the First Person indexes more than 2,500
collections of oral history from around the world. With upcoming
releases, the index will broaden to cover other formats (letters,
diaries, autobiographies, and so forth) and the proprietary content
in the Alexander Street collections. By the end of 2005, the index
will point to 350,000 pages of full text and 3,500 collections—more
than a million pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400
years. (If you own or subscribe to any Alexander Street databases
that contain first-person content indexed by In the First Person,
the citations will link to the full text with one click.)

I hope that you enjoy In the First Person!