Alexander Street Press

Alexander Street Press LLC is a scholarly electronic publisher that publishes in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Like Ebsco, Proquest, Thomson Gale, and the Cambridge Information Group it is one of a number of companies engaged in 'born native' digital publishing.

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 2006, the company had grown to more than 60 employees and offices in the US, 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 November 2004, Alexander Street acquired the principal assets of Classical International, 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. The founders of Classical International - Roger Press and Tim Lloyd hold senior positions 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". A small number of Ad Fontes staff were retained as Alexander Street employees. Peter Cooper, one of the founders of Ad Fontes, now heads up religious publishing for Alexander Street.

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.

As of January 2007, Alexander Street Press had estimated revenues in excess of $7m per annum. The company claims more than 1,000 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 50 products in Diversity Studies, Women's History and Literature, Music, Latin American Literature, Drama, Film, History and Psychology. It hosts two free Web sites. "In the First Person" ( [http://www.inthefirstperson.com] ) is an index to oral histories, letters, diaries, and other personal narratives. "The Second Wave and Beyond" ( [http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com] ) is a scholarly online community for discussing post-1960 feminism.

In April 2007, Alexander Street acquired the principal products of HarpWeek, LLC publisher of "Harper's Weekly" and "Lincoln and the Civil War".

ee also

*Smithsonian Global Sound

External links

* [http://www.alexanderstreet.com Official US Company web site]
* [http://www.alexanderstreet.co.uk Official UK Company web site]
* [http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org Globalsound Website]
* [http://www.classical.com Classical.com Website]
* [http://alexanderstreet.typepad.com/alexander_street_press_ne/ Alexander Street Web Blog]