Alexander Street Press Gets Personal

Four resources create “virtual” look at Civil War; psychology database and first-person narratives also provide human touch

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 09/15/2007

Since being founded in 2000, Alexander Street Press has become one of the premier database publishers in the social sciences and humanities. Its stable of disciplines has expanded to encompass drama and the performing arts, black history, and Latin American literature as well. The company now has products in nine disciplines. Its latest endeavor is a collection of four American Civil War databases presenting the conflict from a more personal perspective, which ultimately will be linked together to create what company president Stephen Rhind-Tutt describes as “a kind of virtual world.” There's also a clinical psychology database that has transcripts of actual therapy sessions submitted by doctors. LJ caught up with Rhind-Tutt for a preview.

Alexander Street has secured an exclusive license for a database of bibliographic information concerning more than four million soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The database was created by a wealthy Massachusetts Civil War enthusiast. “The more he got into the Civil War,” said Rhind-Tutt, “the more he realized that basic questions like how many people actually died in the war from an individual town were unanswerable,” so he began collecting records from multiple sources and rekeying them, ultimately employing a crew of 30 to build the database. As the project gathered momentum, the researcher had volunteers nationwide visiting Civil War grave sites and making records. “In the South, many of the records were destroyed, so the rosters simply aren't there the way they are for the North,” Rhind-Tutt said.

The Civil War Letters and Diaries database includes 130,000 pages of contemporary writings. “The idea is,” said Rhind-Tutt, “that you should be able to get a feel for the story behind the big names. Everyone's read about Lee and Grant, but very few have heard what it was like for a housewife or a common soldier in his or her own words.” Alexander Street also has acquired the HarpWeek Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines database, which launched at the American Library Association conference in June. The materials were gleaned from 20 archives including Chicago's Newberry Library and the American Antiquarian Society. Sources include rarities like Southern Illustrated News. Another resource, American Civil War Research Database, expands the coverage further.

Under development, with a 2008 release date, is Civil War Photographs and Music. When all four databases are interlinked, users can perform a search, for example, for an individual name, check the battles the person fought in, see pictures of the battles if available, read newspaper accounts of the battles, see the names of persons in that individual's unit, and read their diaries and letters—all from a single source. “What we're creating,” said Rhind-Tutt, “is a kind of virtual world that is as much as possible based on the documents. You can look at the Civil War on a completely different level.”

Also new is Primary Sources in Counseling and Psychology. A number of therapists and their patients have granted the publisher permission to replicate the transcripts from their sessions. Because of the sensitive nature of the material, all transcripts go through what Rhind-Tutt called “an extensive anonymization process,” which includes altering patients' names, locations, specific events, and other bits of personal information that would lead to their identity.

While the Civil War databases are straightforward research products of interest to all types of libraries, the psychology database is being marketed to academic research libraries and schools teaching counseling and clinical psychology. “We've taken a policy decision not to sell to public libraries because some of this material is so sensitive we think it's unethical to have teenaged kids in a public library salivating over some sexual misdemeanor. It's not what the database is for,” insists Rhind-Tutt. It's primary source materials like this that Alexander Street finds most in demand from users.

Another cool Alexander Street offering is an online database of first-person narratives called Inthefirstperson.com, a massive index (roughly 700,000 pages, 18,000 individuals) of personal narratives covering a vast array of subjects and encompassing letters, diaries, oral histories, and even audiovisual materials. Rhind-Tutt said that roughly 75 percent of the materials are freely available on the web.