About Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online

1. About the Database

With Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online, Alexander Street Press aims to provide an electronic archive of unprecedented scope. In addition to offering keyword searching across thousands of collections freely available on the Web, the Letters and Diaries Online platform allows users to perform in-depth fielded searches across all of the letter, diary, and oral history collections published commercially by Alexander Street Press.

Letters and Diaries Online offers two distinct but interrelated utilities. First, it brings together, on a single cross-searchable platform, the entire family of letter and diary databases that are available exclusively by purchase or subscription through Alexander Street Press. Of the material currently accessible through Letters and Diaries Online, full-text views of the following Alexander Street Press databases are available exclusively to subscribing institutions:

• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
• British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• Black Thought and Culture
• Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society.

Together, these databases will offer more than 650,000 pages of letters, diaries, autobiographies, oral histories, and other personal narratives--many never before published in print or electronic form. More than 8,000 individual writers are represented in the collection, and the materials provide windows into history dating from 1675 to the present.

In addition to the premium Alexander Street Press content, users will find an in-depth index to nearly 4,000 collections of letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies available on the web in English from around the world. To the premium content, this index adds access to another 700,000 pages of full-text content dating from the 1550s to the present day. It also contains pointers to 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records. By opening this vast treasury of historical information to keyword and fielded searching, Alexander Street Press offers an efficient and highly effective tool for exploring and interpreting the past.

Every document included in the index and full-text collections is deeply indexed for subjects, historical events, personal events, places, and dates. As a result, students and scholars can combine keyword and fielded search capabilities to frame creative and highly targeted queries. The benefit of Alexander Street's semantic indexing is enormous: Complex questions that heretofore might have taken years of research can now be answered in a matter of seconds.

As Alexander Street Press continues to develop new collections featuring letter and diary content, subscribers will enjoy an ever-expanding treasury of eyewitness accounts that vividly document the social history of the English-speaking world. As a further bonus to subscribers, Alexander Street will annually publish an additional 15,000 pages of letters and diaries that fall outside of and supplement the content offered in our themed collections.

2. Subscription and Free Trial Information

For information on how to gain access to the subscription-only portion of Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online, please contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com. Academic institutions and public libraries are encouraged to request a free 30-day trial of this landmark resource.

3. Editorial and Submissions Policy

The goal of Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online is to provide a single, authoritative index to personal narratives in English from around the world. Our criteria for selecting material are as follows:

• The database is for personal narratives as evidenced in letters, diaries, oral histories, interviews, memoirs and autobiographies and similar formats. Items must be personal in nature. We plan to exclude business correspondence, professional interviews, political speeches and similar materials.
• Items must be written in the first person. Letters, diaries, oral histories, and autobiographies are prime examples. The materials should have been created in paper, audio, or video format before 2005.
• The materials should have been produced according to accepted guidelines, such as those published by the American Oral History Association. In all cases releases must have been secured from any participants. We encourage anyone who believes that the database includes materials that have been produced without the permission of the narrator or that infringe personal rights or copyrights in any way to report this to us.
• Items must be submitted with sufficient bibliographic information to ensure verification. This is intended to ensure that materials submitted to us are authentic. In cases of materials submitted by professional staff from accredited institutions we will accept minimal bibliographic information. For materials submitted by lay people we ask for as much detail as possible and prefer facsimiles to accompany any text.
• The materials should detail clearly the narrator, the original source, the date of creation, the format of creation, the place of creation, the current holder and any publication history and (if applicable) the speaker sufficient to enable independent verification.
• We seek materials that are held by and can be verified by museums, archives, and educational institutions. At the discretion of our editors and in cases where the material is of outstanding value, we will include materials from individuals and other parties.
• Alexander Street reserves the right to remove any materials at its sole discretion.

We welcome contributions from organizations and individuals, especially if you have materials that are unpublished or of unique interest. Submitting materials to our editors is easy and without obligation on your part.

• To submit materials for inclusion in the collection, please contact the Editor at editor@astreetpress.com.
• If you are a commercial publisher who would like to discuss licensing materials for inclusion in the database, please contact the Editor at editor@astreetpress.com.
• To report content errors or to suggest improvements, please email us at editor@astreetpress.com. Please include the author, the document, and the page number. Please also include your email address, so that we can let you know the status of your correction.

4. Technical Support

You can contact us by:

• email at support@astreetpress.com.
• telephone toll-free on 1-800-889-5937

When reporting a problem please include your customer name, e-mail address, phone number, domain name or IP address and that of your web proxy server if used.

5. Copyright

All materials in the subscription collections published by Alexander Street Press are protected under U.S. and International Copyright Law. Fair use under the law permits reproduction of single copies for personal research and private use. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of protected items requires the written permission of the copyright owners. For information on the copyright of the freely available materials pointed to by the index, please consult the individual websites.

6. Cataloging Records

MARC records are available for the Alexander Street Press collections included in this resource. Please ask your customer service representative for details.