Alexander Street Press
Alexandria, VA
2003- (projected date for completion is late 2003)
URL: www.alexanderstreetpress.com
One-time subscription is $15,000; yearly subscriptions range from $500-$1,995, depending upon institution budget
Last visited March 2003
Keywords Asia, USA, Theatre
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120310490868

Within the past few decades, Asian-American drama has become a steadily growing field of study at colleges and universities, and Alexander Street Press has successfully kept pace with this scholastic development by publishing their latest specialized database, Asian American Drama. Gathering together 70 plays by 17 authors, as well as detailed information about productions, theatres and production companies, this database will include over 250 by late fall/early winter 2003. These are all by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, as well as playwrights of Hawaiian, Malaysian, Indian, Taiwanese, Persian and Korean ancestry. The collection will span the late nineteenth-century to the current decade.

Although not yet complete, Asian American Drama reflects the usual high quality of Alexander Street Press’s products, both in its content and form. The plays were chosen using authoritative bibliographies and contributions from both playwrights and scholars within the field of Asian-American studies. In addition to providing the full text of plays, Asian American Drama also provides biographical information for each author, production casts and companies that hosted particular performances, both of which prove invaluable for scholars and performers alike. One of Asian American Drama’s most interesting features is the “Showcase”, which functions as a continually changing supplement to the plays within the database. Bearing scanned images of posters, playbills, programmes, photographs, costume designs and sketches from selected performances, the “Showcase” features images that appear in this section before they are indexed within the database under “Related resources”, and once can access these images through either link.

Regarding design, Asian American Drama emulates the layout of Alexander Street’s other databases, providing stylistic consistency and an interface that is easy to navigate. The layout of the home page enables users to quickly determine and select which research route they choose, and the “Table of contents” and “Help” buttons appear on every page. Although the “Help” page is somewhat overwhelming in its extensive list of directives, it is clearly written and supplemented with contact information as well as reliable customer support.

Asian American Drama’s search capabilities are exceptional, providing numerous points of access for each work by allowing one to find plays by author, title, character, subject, year, theatre and production company. The database also includes simple and advanced searches that allow for truncation and wildcards, as well as a “Terms” search that enables limiting of results. One potential shortcoming is substitution of Boolean operators with symbols and spaces (e.g. the vertical line “|” is used instead of “or”), but given the extensive list of subject headings and high level of indexing, this can be somewhat overlooked. The only other shortcomings are a lack of options for caching results in a temporary folder, and for emailing and saving results to disc.

Given the nature of Asian American Drama’s content, copyright varies. Limited numbers of hard copies can be made for educational use, but for performances, one must obtain rights from the appropriate holder, which are listed under the bibliographic details for each play. Licensing rights allow institutions to purchase either a yearly subscription that provides Web access to the database, or a perpetual subscription of a CD-ROM or magnetic tape that can be loaded onto a local server.

The focused content of this database is best suited for graduate students, academics conducting specialized research and individuals teaching and/or performing works within this field. Since the database is still growing, I would suggest that potential buyers hold off purchasing the database until the projected date of completion, early fall or late winter 2003. Once it is completed, however, Asian American Drama will be a highly useful resource for institutions with programmes in literature, drama, and history, and comes strongly recommended.

Meg Meiman
Instructional Services Librarian,
University of Southern Mississippi,
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA