Alexander Street Expands Streaming Video Offerings; Google Announces Magazine Scan Plan; OCLC and National Library of Israel Pilot Completes

-- Library Journal, 12/11/2008

Alexander Street Press, a premier publisher of scholarly databases in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, will next spring roll out two major additions to its PC/Mac-friendly, semantically indexed streaming video series, Critical Video Editions, which launched last summer and currently includes the databases Opera in Video, Dance in Video, and Theater in Video. 

The new databases are Counseling and Therapy in Video, which will feature more than 300 hours of training videos, reenactments, and footage of actual therapy sessions, and American History in Video, which will make available, among other archival material, roughly 1000 newsreels from the late 1890s to the 1980s (a prototype of the latter database will be on display at the American Library Association Midwinter conference). Through Critical Video Editions, whose content derives from partnerships with more than 100 publishers and broadcast companies (including the BBC and the History Channel), users can search, bookmark, annotate, cite, share, and link to content as well as to create clips and personal playlists.

“DVDs are generally more valuable to viewers the longer they are,” company president Stephen Rhind-Tutt told LJ editors during a recent visit, adding that just the opposite is true for academics who wish to do specialized scholarly analysis. The collection’s content consists mostly of previously unavailable material whose rights—some 1200 to date—Alexander Street Press staff has negotiated with estates, publishers, and authors. The offerings are available to academic, public, and school libraries via subscription or one-time purchase of perpetual rights, with prices scaled to institutional size and budget...

Not content to limit Google Book Search to books, search giant and burgeoning e-tailer Google this week announced on its official Google Blog a new initiative to make archival and current magazines accessible and searchable online, including popular titles such as New York Magazine, Ebony, and Popular Mechanics. Starting now, users will be able to search and read an increasing number of magazines online “in full color, each cover, article and advertisement appearing exactly as it did in print.” 

Users can access magazine content via Google Book Search, and eventually, via the main Google search results as well. Google officials said this week’s announcement represents the beginning of a long-term initiative. “Thus far, we’ve digitized more than a million articles from titles ranging from Men's Health, Baseball Digest and Runner's World to local publications like Atlanta Magazine and Indianapolis Monthly.” More to come…

The National Library of Israel and OCLC this week said the two have completed a pilot project resulting in the addition of more than 788,000 new bibliographic records and 1.1 million holdings to WorldCat.org. The National Library of Israel, formerly known as the Jewish National and University Library, worked with OCLC in the pilot project to explore and resolve issues in adding records containing only non-Latin script data to WorldCat. Most of the new records added to WorldCat represent materials in Hebrew script, but significant numbers of records represent Arabic-script and Cyrillic-script publications. 

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