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Free Access in April to American History in Video

Electronic publisher of educational and library reference resources Alexander Street Press announced that its online streaming video collection, American History in Video, will be freely accessible through the month of April at the URL http://alexanderstreet.com/UShistory.htm.

The collection, which was named both a 2009 Booklist Editor's Choice selection and a 2009 Library Journal Best Reference, gives patrons at subscribing libraries access to a current total of more than 4,000 complete newsreels and documentaries from leading video providers, including PBS, The History Channel, Bullfrog Films, California Newsreel, Media Rich Learning, and Documentary Educational Resources, among others. It will grow to include more than 5,000 video titles totaling more than 2,000 hours of footage.

Unique to the collection are the complete series of both United News and Universal Newsreel-content that is currently available in-full nowhere else online-and for rare, archival footage such as that from the Longines Chronoscope series. Also unique is the collection's rich functionality for teaching and research.

Search and browse capabilities are driven by Alexander Street's trademarked Semantic Indexing, which uses extensive controlled vocabularies and more than 15 combinable search fields to help users find and analyze content. Search fields include historical event, era, date, place, historical figure, speaker, subject, video type, and years discussed. Users can quickly compare, for example, Kennedy's rhetorical flair with Nixon's, or find all on-film occurrences of civil disobedience in the southern U.S. prior to 1968, or all footage of Depression-era soup lines. Users can also tap the expertise of others by searching shared clips and playlists within a secure environment.

Technical features built into American History in Video include synchronized, searchable transcripts for every minute of footage; visual tables of contents that let the user quickly scan the content of each video; clip-making and sharing tools; permanent URLs that let users cite and share video of any length down to a second; an embeddable video player that lets libraries and instructors deliver video content to other users on secure website pages or via classroom sites; and playlists that let users organize clips and include links to any content (video or text) anywhere on the web.

After the free open access period has ended, anyone may browse the collection for free, but accessing search or browse results will require authorization. Libraries or faculty needing trial access after the open access period may email sales@alexanderstreet.com.

Source: Alexander Street Press