Alexander Street Press was founded in 2000, and has rapidly emerged as one of the leading producers of digitised collections in the humanities. It is increasingly common for publishers and libraries to digitise collections of manuscripts and printed materials, but for both teaching and research the Alexander Street Press publications are amongst the best I have encountered.

It is the scholarly approach to digitisation and indexing that makes a difference here. For example, the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 database contains approximately 150,000 pages of women’s letters and diaries. But while the quantity of materials is impressive, it is the quality of indexing and the user-friendly search engine that makes the material so exciting. The Alexander Street Press editors have gone through each and every document, carefully indexing the contents: thus, for example, one can search for all diary entries by white Southern women, written between 1789 and 1861, mentioning slavery. Such a search generates a lot of results, but could be further narrowed to all diary entries mentioning inter-racial sex, or any of a variety of other topics. The indexing is very thorough – it is quite appropriately termed semantic indexing by Alexander Street Press staff – so that a search will pick up references to something like childbirth even if that precise term is not used in the diary or letter.

There are a growing number of excellent databases available in this series, including Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment; North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories; The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries; American Film Scripts Online; and British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries. Once your library has purchased access, there is tremendous research and teaching potential. One colleague of mine used American Civil War database to locate evidence for his study for clinical depression in nineteenth-century America, while a postgraduate student employed the Early Encounters database for a superb M.Phil. dissertation based on early Indian-European meetings chronicled in the Jesuit Relations. I have used the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries database in my honours course on U.S. Women’s History, including certain documents as required reasons, and encouraging students to employ the database in researching their essays.

More information about Alexander Street Press and its products is available from http://www.alexanderstreet.com/