NC LIVE has chosen Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., to provide North Carolina citizens, students, and scholars with an important electronic resource. This is the first system-wide acquisition of Alexander Street products by NC LIVE. The full-text database acquired is North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950. This collection will be accessible to North Carolina's public libraries, community colleges, the state's university system, and members of the North Carolina Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

"Alexander Street Press is delighted by NC LIVE's decision to make North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950 accessible to the students, faculty, and citizens of North Carolina," said Stephen Rhind-Tutt, president of Alexander Street Press, when announcing the agreement. "We have pledged that our databases will bring value far beyond mere digitization, with broad and deeply indexed collections. NC LIVE has recognized the added value we are offering to their users."

Eileen Lawrence, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, adds, "We believe that in the rush to digitize data, publishers often miss the importance of librarianship and scholarship. This database, produced with Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing, enables users to ask questions in ways that have been difficult or impossible before. We're excited by the possibilities that this acquisition opens up for the North Carolina community."

Larry Alford from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NC LIVE resources co-negotiator said, "NC LIVE is excited by the opportunity to work with Alexander Street Press to bring to the citizens of North Carolina the extraordinary resources contained in North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950. Adding this resource will greatly enrich NC LIVE's full-text content and strengthen NC LIVE's offerings of primary source material."

North American Women's Letters and Diaries is the largest electronic collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled. The collection includes 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950 (much in-copyright), plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts, in electronic format for the first time. Drawn from more than 1,500 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, the writings represent all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, all geographical regions, the famous and the unknown. The diaries provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves. We can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. We can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends.

Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing goes beyond conventional indexing, which usually limits searches to date, author, title, and keyword. Queries in this database will quickly produce large sets of search results that would have taken years, or been impossible, without the database itself.

North Carolina Libraries for Virtual Education (NC LIVE) supports the state's vision of each library in the state to serve as a gateway to the total library resources in the state, as well as to a rich array of electronic information. These resources are made available to all the people of the state, regardless of location or time, through traditional and non-traditional means. NC LIVE currently offers the citizens of North Carolina online access to complete articles from over 5,500 newspapers, journals, magazines, and encyclopedias, indexing for over 15,000 periodical titles, and access to over 13,000 electronic books, all free of charge.

Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is a publisher of electronic full-text databases in the humanities and social sciences. The company, which won the most recent "Best New Product" award from The Charleston Advisor, produces databases in history, women's studies, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, film studies, the arts, and other areas. Titles include North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950; Black Drama; The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries; Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Places, and the Environment; American Film Scripts Online; British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries; Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; and others. The company is also the North American distributor of the Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts (by Ad Fontes). Alexander Street Press is located in Alexandria, Virginia.

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For additional information on NC LIVE please contact Sandra Cooper, State Librarian, State Library of North Carolina, (919) 733- 9923, scooper@library.dcr.state.nc.us. Additional information about NC LIVE may be found at http://www.nclive.org/.

For more information on Alexander Street Press and its products, contact Eileen Lawrence, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, (800) 889-5937 or lawrence@alexanderstreet.com, or visit http://alexanderstreet.com.