Multimedia Multiplied

In recent columns, and just in the course of carrying out our reference chores around the library for that matter, we've marveled at some of the brilliant innovations that have cropped up in a number of relatively traditional database products.

The results lists of EBSCO products are now laced with images that give researchers a vivid snapshot of what they'll find in the corresponding document. Oxford Music Online quite naturally incorporates audio samples to give voice to its encyclopedia entries. Gale's Health Reference Center Academic includes not only the full text of consumer health magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, topical overviews, and reference books—a pretty remarkable range of content in and of itself—but also hundreds of videos demonstrating medical procedures, courtesy of OR-Live.

The resources we examine in this column—and numerous others we might have chosen—take these innovations to another level entirely. Images, audio, and video are the essence of these products, and their creativity, pace of development, and breadth of coverage are extraordinary.

Alexander Street, alexanderstreet.com

CONTENT This newest Alexander Street video collection—currently with 1479 videos and equaling nearly 500 hours of viewing time—is part of an exclusive collaboration between the producer and A&E Television Networks. Providing customizable access (clip-making tools, annotated playlists, etc.) for the wide-range study of American history through video, the collection is organized into 13 Historical Eras, from "Discovery and Exploration (1492–1650)" through "Late Twentieth Century (1975–2000)," with nearly 700 titles categorized within the "Post-war Era (1945–1960)." When complete, the collection will provide users with 2000 viewable hours and more than 5000 videos with complete transcripts.

American History in Video includes documentaries and series from The History Channel, Bullfrog Films, PBS, and Chronoscope (Columbia Broadcasting System), to name just a few; governmental and commercial newsreels from United News (Office of War Information) and Universal Newsreel (Universal Pictures Company, Inc.); and much more.

A recent update added publisher agreements and eight new titles, including "Better Housing News Flashes," covering the New Deal era, "Citizen King," profiling Martin Luther King Jr., and "Rain for the Earth," chronicling farm hardships and drought during the depression years.

One of many features worth mentioning are the searchable transcripts synchronized to each video. This allows users not only to get to the exact segment of a video in seconds but to have the accompanied text at their fingertips almost instantly. (All videos and transcripts have been semantically indexed and are fully searchable and browsable.)

Subscribers can share videos via embedded links, view user-created playlists and clips featured within the system, annotate and create their own unique play-lists, and integrate additional resources from outside the collection for further enhancement of a particular topic or area of research and study.

SEARCHABILITY The interface affords a variety of browse and/or search modes, so whatever your preferences might be, navigating American History in Video should put all users at ease. In addition to the usual options, the opening screen provides revolving images of featured playlists and individual titles, allowing users to jump in and start exploring the current offerings—always a great way to familiarize oneself with the features.

Consistent navigation throughout the entire session via a tool bar at the top of the screen includes the tabs Browse for All Videos, Newsreel, Historical Eras, Years Discussed, Historical Events, People, Places, Topics, All Subjects, and Clips; or Search (both Basic and Advanced) All, Title and Series, People, Topic, Transcript Text, Summary, and All Subjects. There's also a tab to preview Playlists either by searching in specified fields or by browsing through the displayed list. As mentioned above, playlists are "themed collections" of content and can be created by any user of the database. These can be entire videos, specific tracks, clips, or external resources and can be annotated, edited, copied, or shared with others. Tabs include All Playlists, My Playlists, and My Institution's Playlists. Users must register to take advantage of this feature, and My Playlists are only visible to individual users when signed into their personal account.

Similarly, clips are segments of video created by any user of the database. Select a section of video with a helpful tool, annotate, and then save the selection as a playable clip. Clips can be added to playlists or saved separately in My Clips.

A column on the left side of the home screen allows for Browse by the options described above as well as by Historical Eras.

As we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, we started with a search for "hippies" (in All), getting zero results under Title and Series, People, and Topic and four results under Transcript Text. Although the Help mentions not using plural, we retrieved different results with hippie or hippies.

Here we found many references to hippies centering on the Vietnam Conflict, one on cultural events in California, and the most promising, a PBS video titled "Summer of Love," part of the "American Experience" series. The result list includes the highlighted search term in context, along with an icon to play the clip that corresponds to the transcript—jumping through the video to the exact segment needed. We were impressed with this feature no matter how many times we ran search queries. The system also searches all playlists and clips, and for this term we retrieved a clip ("From Baby Boomers to Hippies") from an Alexander Street Press editor, whose research expertise includes The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974.

In addition to the Transcript tab, each video also has a Clips tab, which includes any clips created from the entire video. "Summer of Love" has individual clips associated with it, such as Timothy Leary's famous "turn on, tune in, drop out" speech, the Digger Movement, and "The Power of LSD." Users can embed clips on web sites or share via email and make creative playlists. In addition, a "Make Clip" icon allows users to create a clip easily, title it, define the length, and set restrictions as to who can view it (Just me, My institution only, Everyone).

PRICING This is available for one-time purchase of perpetual access or as an annual subscription. Pricing is determined by FTE for schools and by number of cardholders for public libraries. Subscriptions range from $775 to $2495 per year.

END USERS Faculty and students will love the time-saving feature of creating clips and playlists accompanied by synchronized transcripts. The combination of material will appeal to all levels of users, from elementary school on up, and the suite of tools (which really are simple to use) makes this quite an extensible resource for in-depth study. The only issue worth mentioning is the use of Adobe Flash, which may be a concern with the increase of mobile users.

Wilson, www.hwwilson.com

CONTENT Introduced in January 2009, Cinema Image Gallery is one of the newer online collections added to Wilson's expanding Art Suite, serving as an important companion to Art Museum Image Gallery, a collection of paintings, photographs, jewelry, sculpture, etc., from museums and private collections around the world. Built around the extensive Kobal Collection (an image archive of the movie, television, and entertainment industries), Cinema Image Gallery contains 200,000-plus (and growing) high-quality still images from movies, television, and the entertainment industry, along with 4000-plus promotional poster art and lobby cards, from the late 1800s to the present.

Unique in the comprehensive presentation of the history of moviemaking, the collection comprises a wide array of material for researchers as well as movie buffs, including still images of films in production, directors working on-set with the actors, formal set and publicity shots, costumes and production design, as well as hair and makeup shots and candid behind-the-scenes photos. Many images are rare and have never been publicly available.

The file also offers a TV stills archive, including classic and modern comedies, dramas, series, TV movies, game shows, and more.

All image rights are cleared for education use—an important factor for faculty and students to consider when incorporating images into lesson plans, projects, and presentations. Many records link to reviews and other articles about the term queried through a "More Information" link, and subscribers can seamlessly search from the Wilson Art Suite (Art Full Text, Art Index, Art Index Retrospective: 1929–1984, Art Museum Image Gallery, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, and the forthcoming International Bibliography of Art) as well as other Wilson databases.

The system also includes links to biographical content from Wilson's Current Biography, and nearly 100 films include linking to full online videos from Internet Archive's Moving Image Archive, although it was difficult to limit to that subset of titles.

The database currently includes 129 film records from 2009, and quarterly updates will add images from new productions.

SEARCHABILITY Searching is quite inclusive and should satisfy all types of users—from serious film studies researchers to the ardent fans wanting to browse and save photos of their favorite actor in action. Cinema Image Gallery employs all the standard WilsonWeb features, including the helpful All-Smart Search. Basic is an option, but the real functionality lies with Advanced, where users can search by 15 fields, including Title, Director, Genre, Country of Production (new), Subject of Film (new), and Based On. Awards can also be searched, or limited by, with Academy Award, Cannes, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild. Award Category includes the standards one would expect, along with Best Costume Design (new), Grand Prix, and Palme d'Or. Genre limiting is extensive within the Advanced Options and offers 42 categories, including Blaxploitation, Comic Book, Game Show, James Bond, and Talk Show.

Having just watched the remake of The Parent Trap on TV, we started with a search for Hayley Mills, retrieving 58 records and learning that the original 1961 film had an alternative title: La Fiancée de papa.

At the left of the results are several new limiting choices under "Content Discovery Keys," which allowed us to further refine or focus our search results, either by a search for additional material on subjects included in the original query (John Mills, Maurice Chevalier) or by narrowing by Genre (Family, Mystery), Photo Type, etc. Results can be limited to Film or Image Records, depending on one's research needs. We limited to On/Off Set in Photo Type, retrieving six image records, ranging from a 1960 black-and-white photo of Mills as a young girl to a full-cast color shot from the 1988 film Appointment with Death.

Each "master" film record has searchable fields, some more comprehensive than others, including personalities, credits, major award nominations and wins, etc. All images can be viewed together in the master record, and a new slideshow feature is available in the current release.

As mentioned above, film and image records are linked to relevant entries in Wilson's Current Biography database, and records include links and full-text to peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed articles and/or reviews from a variety of Wilson's bibliographic and full-text databases, as well as the freely available Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).

Wilson's new text-to-speech option allowed us to listen to an article "The Parent Trap Times Three," which analyzed the 1998 "Re-make" (an actual Genre limit) together with the 1961 movie (with Mills), which was based on the 1949 children's tale, Das Doppelte Lottchen.

Worth mentioning: audio files can be translated into 12 languages and downloaded as mp3 files for later listening on the device of your choice.

PRICING It varies by market: for schools it starts at $360, for community colleges and public libraries at $1360, and for academic at $2060. Both Art Museum and Cinema Image Gallery are priced the same, and discounts are available when purchased with other Art Suite products.

END USERS Cinema Image Gallery clearly provides unique access to movie and television material for educational, research, and just plain enjoyment purposes. Film studies programs in addition to large public and arts libraries will greatly benefit from what we've previewed, and although access to linked material is viewable by all users, it's self-evident that seamless searching with other subscribed Wilson databases will undoubtedly increase the value.

ProQuest, www.proquest.com

CONTENT Distributed exclusively to libraries by ProQuest, Critical Mention provides access to news footage—sometimes within minutes of airing—from over 300 sources, including national broadcast networks, cable channels (from A&E, BET, and CNN to VH1 and the Weather Channel), and independent stations in the United States, as well as BBC World, CNBC Europe, and several Middle Eastern television networks. When necessary, transcripts in English-language translation are provided.

There are also audio clips from radio broadcasters such as NPR, Canada's all-news AM station CFFR, and XM Satellite Radio's political news channel POTUS, among others. In all, Critical Mention provides video clips in 15 different programming categories, including News, Talk, Public affairs, Newsmagazine, Educational, Consumer, Documentary, Entertainment, Event, Politics, and Sports, with a 30-day rolling backfile.

The Critical Mention iTV option adds access to the top 100 U.S. DMAs (Designated Market Areas) and a text archive.

SEARCHABILITY The basic Critical Mention access page is disarmingly simple. There's a Quick Search box; a toll-free number for ordering video galleries, hard copies, and transcripts; and a link to the New Advanced Search mode.

In Advanced Search mode, users get a clear view of both the resource's sophisticated searching capabilities and the richness and variety of its contents. Keyword searching gives the user a Boolean option as well as a search template that allows the user to automatically AND all the words entered, to search for an exact phrase, to OR terms together, or to exclude results where specific keywords appear. Radio buttons permit limiting results to Video, Text, or Both.

A lengthy listing of television and radio outlets follows, a grouping that incorporates a simple set of plus and minus tabs that enable the searcher to include all available sources or just a select few. In similar fashion, the searcher may include all 188 markets and all 15 news categories, or, alternatively, by clicking on the minus tab, turn them all off and reselect just those that he or she chooses to investigate. Researchers can combine keywords with selected networks, markets, news categories, and date/time ranges to construct high-precision search strategies.

We searched for "senator sharrod brown" (a Democrat from Ohio who has been deeply involved with health-care legislation as a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) in the "With the exact phrase" box of the Keyword search template. This produced a results list with five items, and Brown's name appears in bold in the excerpted transcripts that accompanied each of the five items. Clicking the Play Clip button, of course, starts the video footage, while clicking View Timeline breaks the clip down into one-minute segments—a particularly nice feature given that it can get users much closer to the precise point in the program that they find interesting.

Once a clip has been selected, it can be played or ordered from Critical Mention. Classes or other work groups can also share clips via email or add them to a secure private gallery.

PRICING Libraries should contact their ProQuest representative for specific pricing information.

END USERS While Critical Mention is likely to be of interest to anyone even remotely identifiable as a news junky, it is particularly geared toward those for whom immediate access to news in its original video or audio format—plus the ability to share these clips securely among colleagues or students, if necessary—is critical to what they do.

DRAM, www.dramonline.org

CONTENT DRAM (formerly Database of Recorded American Music) is an online music database whose mission, in part, involves the dissemination of an exceptionally wide range of recordings that mostly ignore the conventional boundaries of mainstream musical taste. Preservation is another key aspect of DRAM's mission in that access to this music would otherwise be severely limited, as a number of the labels represented here are no longer operational.

NYU, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and New World Records—dedicated since 1975 to the documentation of all styles of American music from Sioux powwows to Civil War and cowboy songs to jazz and contemporary electronica—have all played critical roles in breathing life into this visionary, if somewhat unlikely, resource. Additional participating labels include CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.), Albany, Artifact, Innova, Cedille, Cold Blue, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening, Frog Peak, Lovely Music, Mode, Open Space, and Mutable Music, and the works of Dartmouth archive of electronic music pioneer Jon Appleton are also included.

As of July 1, 2009, 2,555 albums were available to subscribers for on-demand streaming, with plans to add another 600 or so, including all upcoming releases of nine active labels. DRAM is also soliciting additional collections to further augment its contents.

The audio quality is exceptional, and recordings come complete with original artwork and liner notes—a major plus for both the historic New World Records releases and the more conceptual contemporary recordings.

DRAM operates as a not-for-profit organization.

SEARCHABILITY The DRAM home-page features browse access to short but expandable listings of Composers, Ensembles, Performers, Instruments, and Labels. There is also a Quick Search box with a pull-down menu that enables searching by Titles, Tags, Performers, Liner Notes, Record Labels, Instruments, Ensembles, Composers, and Catalog Code. Additional tabs lead to Browse and Search modes, a Random musical selection, blogs with news and playlists, and About and Help pages.

While Browse is a pretty effective and satisfying way to explore a resource like DRAM, the search capabilities are impressive and extensive, including single-term and phrase searching (using quotation marks), field searching, wildcards and truncation, proximity searching, Boolean operations (AND, OR, and NOT), and nesting.

A permanent URL feature facilitates the quick return to any recording in the database, and liner notes are easily accessible via a link on each recording's page. Searchers also have the option of buying recordings that interest them via a link that takes them to the site for the label that issued the recording.

PRICING It's based on an institution's Carnegie classification, as adapted by JSTOR and ARTstor, a system that considers the types of degrees granted and FTE enrollment. Annual subscription fees start at $495 for independent music and art schools and climb to $1,995 for very large research institutions, with four fee levels—$795, $995, $1,295 and $1,695—in between. DRAM imposes no limit on the number of simultaneous users.

END USERS According to the DRAM web site, the expectation is that musicians and musicologists will make up the lion's share of the audience for this resource. In addition, a significant number of recordings could easily be worked into any number of history, anthropology, or sociology courses. It's way more than that, though. DRAM will appeal to anyone who appreciates music that takes some chances—and with artists like Anthony Braxton, Julius Eastman, Cecil Taylor, and Meredith Monk well represented here, there is a lot to appreciate.

Naxos of America, www.naxosspokenwordlibrary.com

CONTENT Naxos Spoken Word Library (NSWL) gives subscribers on-demand, streaming access to more than 500 audiobook titles. While the bulk of the collection falls into the Classic Fiction category, a much broader range of material, genres, and subject areas rounds out the collection, and content is organized into a number of obvious and easily accessible categories. These include Anthologies/Collections, Arts, Biographies, Children's Classics, Great Epics and Tales, History, Junior Classic Fiction, Junior History, Junior Non-Fiction, Literature, Music Biographies, Music Education, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Plays (by Shakespeare and by Others), Poetry, Religion, Samplers, and Sports, and there's even a Wine Guide.

While the audio quality is very good, the readers—among them such names as Ralph Fiennes, John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Kate Beckinsale, Dylan Thomas, and numerous other extremely talented but less well known individuals—are even better.

NSWL is quite a dynamic resource, growing by over 50 titles from April 1 through September 1, 2009. About a third of the recordings added during this period included the text of the original work. Five of the seven newest releases were unabridged, while Dickens's Dombey and Son appeared in both abridged and unabridged versions.

SEARCHABILITY NSWL's homepage features a brief (but expandable) list of recent additions to the library plus a half-dozen featured titles. The 23 categories noted above are arrayed on the left side of the screen. Except for the more than 230 titles collected under Classic Fiction and the 70 or so under Junior Classic Fiction, most listings are relatively short, running just a screen or two and so are easily browsed.

A Quick Search box on the home-page provides access to NSWL's contents by Keyword, Author, Reader, Title, and ISBN. All search terms are automatically ANDed together, and certain common words are ignored. The system is not case sensitive, and there is no truncation or wildcard capability, in order to "provide the most accurate results," says the online Help, somewhat dubiously, we think. The search engine can be a little fussy. For example, a search for "childs christmas in wales" produced the prompt, Did you mean "child's christmas in wales."

Additional access points include New Releases, Recent Additions, Readers/Actors, Authors, English Titles, German Titles, Labels, and Text Search.

Once an item has been selected for listening, Naxos gives the user a very nice array of tools, options, and extras to enhance the listening experience. There's a brief synopsis of the work, plus useful information such as the reader and the playing time. The Naxos AudioBooks catalog information also appears. Most works are broken up into digestible-sized segments, and there's an icon indicating that text is included whenever that is the case.

Clicking the About This Recording link brings up a substantial essay on the written work upon which that recording is based. The piece on Samuel Beckett's novel Malone Dies is nearly 2000 words, while the notes on Malise Ruthven's Islam: A Very Short Introduction run nearly 3000 words.

A search widget for Cambridge Dictionaries Online appears on the page for each work, so those accustomed to keeping a dictionary handy as they read can continue that practice while enjoying the NSWL experience—a really nice touch.

The availability of static URLs makes it easy to add a recording (or a specific track) to a course web site or more simply to return to the spot where a listener last left off. It is also possible to print both the text and the liner notes for closer offline study.

PRICING Annual subscriptions to NSWL are priced at $60 per simultaneous user, with no minimum number of required users. Obviously, this gives libraries considerable flexibility in determining a suitable level of access, although just as obviously, subscribers need to recognize that—given the lengthy duration of many of the files here—any given user may be listening online for an extended period of time.

END USERS Someone hoping to find popular, contemporary audiobook titles or the ability to download and save audio files to a hard drive or portable device might be disappointed with NSLW, but those expectations would be inconsistent with the product Naxos is offering. What the company does offer, however, is a gem. Suitable for a wide range of users.

AP INTERACTIVES

Gale Cengage, www.gale.cengage.com

Presented in partnership with the Associated Press (AP) and organized into broad subject categories—U.S. Domestic News & Features, World Leaders, Finance, Sports, Travel, Science, etc.—AP Interactives offers browsing as well as a highly refined advanced search mode. Updated weekly, with timely presentations covering recent stories and events, the research database includes AP photographs, narrative text (news briefs and photo captions), audio, video, animated slide shows with interactive graphics, maps, charts, and tables.

ART MUSEUM IMAGE GALLERY

Wilson, www.hwwilson.com

An important companion to Wilson's Cinema Image Gallery (see full review, p. 106), this product includes art images and related multimedia gathered from museums worldwide, including Musée du Louvre, the British Museum, and nearly 2000 others. More than 160,000 high-quality images cover folk art, architecture, paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs. The collection can be searched alone or simultaneously with other WilsonWeb databases, particularly those included in the Art Suite.

ARTSTOR DIGITAL LIBRARY

ARTstor, www.artstor.org

Celebrating five years this past summer, this is a repository of more than one million digital images and associated metadata pertaining to art, architecture, the humanities, and the social sciences—with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and instructive purposes. Recently added collections include Architectural photography from Ezra Stoller, Korean Buddhist monasteries and temples, and World Wars I and II postcards and posters. Users can browse by a wide range of topics, including America Studies, Architecture and Architectural History, and Foreign Languages and Literature.

CRITICAL VIDEO EDITIONS

Alexander Street, alexanderstreet.com

Alexander Street has partnered with a variety of publishers and broadcast companies, including BBC, Creative Arts Television, and Insight Media, to create Critical Video Editions—currently or soon to be included with American History in Video (see full review, p. 104), Counseling and Therapy in Video, Dance in Video, Opera in Video, and Theatre in Video (with optional BBC Shakespeare Series add-on). The series includes a variety of cool tools, such as full-text transcripts when available, custom clip-making, personal playlists, embeddable links, and more.

HISTORY REFERENCE CENTER

EBSCO, www.ebscohost.com

Designed for the secondary school/public library markets, this product includes full-text coverage of 2500-plus reference and nonfiction books, 130-plus periodicals, 61,000 historical documents, 66,000-plus biographies of historical figures, 113,000-plus historical photos and maps, and more than 80 hours of historical streaming video. The collection of motion picture film and videotape provides recordings of the social, political, and cultural history of the 20th century. Video clips are properly cited, with the inclusion of linked subject headings and pertinent metadata.

NAXOS MUSIC LIBRARY (NML)

Naxos Digital Services, www.naxosmusiclibrary.com

This collection of Western classical music includes the complete Naxos, Marco Polo, and Da Capo catalogs of over 500,000 tracks. It comprises Classical Music, Historical Recordings, Jazz, World, Folk, Contemporary Instrumental, Pop and Rock, and Chinese music. Users can read notes on the works being played as well as biographical information on composers or artists in Naxos's extensive database. With static URLs, playlists can also be easily created for educational use or just for pleasure. NML currently contains 36,000-plus CDs, with 1000 new CDs added every month.

NONBOOK MATERIALS CORE COLLECTION

Wilson, www.hwwilson.com

Part of the Wilson Core Collection (formerly the Wilson Standard Catalog)—a set of databases providing detailed listings of the "must-have" resources that all school and public libraries should include on their shelves—this collection profiles nearly 3000 multimedia resources, including audio books, video recordings, sound recordings, games, simulations, and more. Annotations include review excerpts and awards.

VANDERBILT TELEVISION NEWS ARCHIVE

Vanderbilt University, tvnews.vanderbilt.edu

The "world's most extensive and complete archive of television news," Vanderbilt Television News has been recording, preserving, and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks, starting with coverage of the 1968 Republican National Convention. The archive offers abstracts of 850,000 news stories and 30,000 hours of programming. Users may browse or search the regular newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, and, more recently, CNN (beginning in 1995) and FoxNews (beginning in 2003) and then request—on a fee-based loan basis—either duplication (in DVD or VHS format) of a specific newscast or a custom compilation of news clips.