Alexander Street Press LLC is a premier database publisher in the humanities and social sciences [1][2]. Like Ebsco, Proquest, Gale Cengage, and the Cambridge Information Group, it's engaged in 'born native' digital publishing.[3]
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Database publishing, audio and video streaming |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. |
| Employees | 80 (2010) |
Alexander Street Press was founded in May 2000 in Alexandria, Virginia, by Stephen Rhind-Tutt (President), Janice Cronin (CFO), and Eileen Lawrence (Vice President, Sales and Marketing). Don McCrae and Ron Rietdyk were also founders in non-executive roles. Graham Dimmock, Will Whalen and Pat Carlson completed the management team, handling development and production respectively. Laura Gosling, Daryl Baker, John O'Keefe, Kelly Connor, Jennifer Hewitt, George Chinnery, and Christina Keller were the earliest employees. As of August 2010, the company had grown to more than 80 employees and offices in the US, China, Brazil, and the UK, with sales staff and agents around the world.
The company's first product was North American Women's Letters and Diaries, a collection of 150,000 pages of letters and diaries by women from colonial times through the 1950s. Charter customers included Boston College, the California Digital Library (for all campuses of the University of California System), Columbia University, Emory University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Vassar College, and Yale University.
In 2000 and in collaboration with the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago[4] the company began using semantic indexing techniques in its Humanities databases. It created metadata elements for gender, age, and sexual orientation of characters within plays; author nationality, birth and death place, as well as where and when an item was written. These elements were then combined with full-text search to allow material to be analyzed in new ways[5][6][7].
In 2003 the company began a major partnership with The Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York to publish Women and Social Movements. This has subsequently become a leading site for the study of women's history[8][9]
In November 2004, Alexander Street acquired the principal assets of Classical International[10], a London and New York-based publisher of streaming music for libraries. This led to a new range of music publications, including a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution to provide Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries and African American Song. One of the founders of Classical International, Tim Lloyd, is currently COO at Alexander Street.
In November 2005 Alexander Street acquired the range of religious products produced by Ad Fontes,LLC, including The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts and The Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation.
In 2005 the company expanded into Europe, setting up an office in Stevenage, UK. In 2007 it began an office in Shanghai, China under the leadership of Jia Jun Zhu and Ning Zhu. These offices are complemented by individuals working in Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.
In October 2006 the company acquired the assets of University Music Editions, a small microfilm publisher specializing in the publication of scores, journals and other musically oriented publications. These collections were subsequently released as part of Classical Scores Library.
Late in 2006 the company began development of online collections of video. Theatre in Video was published in April 2007 and has been followed by a succession of online streaming video collections. Using techniques such as semantic indexing, initially developed for textual databases, it was an early provider of synchronized, scrolling transcripts that allow the watcher to read ahead. At the 2010 Midsummer American Library Association the company advertised 9 streaming video collections spanning more than 9,000 individual video titles[11].
In April 2007, Alexander Street acquired the principal products of HarpWeek, LLC publisher of Harper's Weekly and Lincoln and the Civil War.
As of January 2010, Alexander Street Press had estimated revenues in excess of $12m per annum. The company claims more than 1,500 agreements with authors, estates, publishers, film studios and music labels, including Warner Bros., EMI, and a large number of university presses. Its catalog lists more than 70 products in Anthropology, Education, Counseling and Therapy, Diversity Studies, Women's History and Literature, Music, Latin American Literature, Drama, Film, and History.
In September 2010 Alexander Street acquired Microtraining Associates, LLC, a specialist producer and distributor of therapy and counseling video. In December 2010 the company acquired Filmakers Library, Inc, a distributor of issue based documentaries.