brings together the skills of traditional publishing, librarianship, and software development to create quality electronic collections.
We believe that an electronic publication should:

Be carefully crafted by expert editors around a specific subject or discipline. Detail all materials relevant to the subject, whatever their original form or ownership. Contain as many of these materials as possible, in multiple formats if necessary. Be indexed with controlled vocabularies for precise, exhaustive searching. Provide unique ways of searching, viewing, exploring and analyzing the material. Facilitate contributions from scholars and librarians. Be priced to enable unlimited exploration by users.

We are creating a series of products using these values.

Company History

Alexander Street Press, L.L.C. was founded in May 2000, with the goal of publishing large-scale digital collections of exceptional quality in the humanities and social sciences.

From the beginning, we built products that contained quality in-copyright and previously unpublished material. We also indexed each database with our unique Semantic Indexing, which allowed scholars to search and analyze our materials as never before.

Our first products were letter-and-diary collections in American history and women’s history. From there, we expanded into drama and the performing arts, then into black history, Latin American literature, and on to streaming music and video. Today our collections span around a dozen discipline clusters.

Alexander Street products have won significant recognition, including awards for “Best New Product” and “Best Content” from The Charleston Advisor; numerous appearances on Library Journal’s “Best of the Year” lists; “Product of the Month” from the History News Network; many Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” awards; and consistently excellent reviews in library journals.

Our acquisition of Classical International, Ltd. in 2004 provided us with expertise, software, and partners in streaming audio. Since then, we’ve grown our music portfolio from some 35,000 tracks to more than 130,000, and the databases are steadily growing. We’ve also added audio oral histories, speeches, and interviews to our text collections. Our music portfolio has expanded to provide scores, lyrics, reference works, and other related resources.

Late in 2005, we launched In the First Person, a landmark index to letters, diaries, and oral histories, and announced that it is free to libraries around the world. The project provides a high quality, semantic index for materials that are freely available on the Web and also is a single index for searching proprietary materials in our collections. Libraries everywhere have embraced the project.

Late in 2005, Alexander Street also purchased the assets of Ad Fontes, LLC., a publisher of primary texts in religion. The high-quality texts and indexing that Ad Fontes had created across 500,000 pages of extremely rare material provided a natural platform for growth. We have expanded our offerings in the area of religion and social thought, with Social Theory and The Digital Karl Barth Library.

In 2006, we launched our first streaming video collection, Theatre in Video. Educators, researchers, and students now have a powerful tool to study the performing arts in ways never before possible. Our video portfolio includes hundreds of hours of concert dance, opera, documentaries, and theatrical performances by leading actors and directors. Streaming video has also been incorporated into a number of our text collections.

Today, Alexander Street publishes more than 60 collections totaling many millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists. We’re concentrating on building the best collections we can across the humanities—in Literature; Music; Women's History; Black History; Psychological Counseling and Therapy; Social and Cultural History; Drama, Theatre, Film, and the Performing Arts; Religion; Sociology; and other emerging areas. In each of these we provide unique resources for scholarship.

Since it was founded, Alexander Street has paid out more than $5million in royalties and currently pays out more than $2million annually. We have more than 800 business partners, including music labels (such as EMI); film studios (Warner Bros., Sony-Columbia, and others); publishers (such as Oxford University Press, Alfred A. Knopf); literary estates, agents, and individual authors; and a list of others. We have been the first to publish more than 2,000 works, including plays by such major writers as Sam Shepard and Derek Walcott.

Throughout our short history, Alexander Street and its staff have been blessed with support, guidance, and suggestions from customers—and we embrace even our critics. In fact, we think that the feedback is the main ingredient contributing to our success. We welcome your comments!