New database available for trial

At ALA, a new Alexander Street resource was announced - and it's FREE! It's called In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories, and Other Personal Narratives. You can start using it right now at www.inthefirstperson.com.

In the First Person is a new library index that lets users perform in-depth field and keyword searches across all letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies within scholarly materials that are freely available on the Web and Alexander Street databases. With a single search, users can access thousands of personal narratives in English from archives and repositories everywhere. The search returns citation information and links to full text, audio, and video whenever available.

Every imaginable topic, historical event, and person is covered, from World War I and II to popular culture, music to medicine, Hitler to John Wayne, gay rights to September 11th. It's the most comprehensive archive of social memory yet created - a one-stop starting point for historians, sociologists, genealogists, linguists, and psychologists who want to find, explore, and analyze human experiences. And it will be updated quarterly.

The first release of In the First Person indexes more than 2,500 collections of oral history from around the world. With upcoming releases, the index will broaden to cover other formats (letters, diaries, autobiographies, and so forth) and the proprietary content in the Alexander Street collections. By the end of 2005, the index will point to 350,000 pages of full text and 3,500 collections-more than a million pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400 years. (If you own or subscribe to any Alexander Street databases that contain first-person content indexed by In the First Person, the citations will link to the full text with one click.)