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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jennifer Heffelfinger
Alexander Street Press, LLC
jheffelfinger@alexanderstreet.com
800-889-5937 ext. 5

(Alexandria, VA – May 17, 2004) Oral histories from the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA), at the California Digital Library’s Online Archive of California, topped Alexander Street Press’s first list of most popular oral history Web sites.

The Oral History Top 100, which ranks the collections and interviews most frequently used through Oral History Online, is compiled quarterly by Alexander Street Press using statistics generated from their comprehensive Internet-based index to oral histories.

Said Eileen Lawrence, vice president of sales and marketing, “Two things strike us about these first results. First is the sheer level of interest in oral histories, which is staggering. In the past month, usage has gone up several hundred percent, and we expect to get several thousand visits in the upcoming weeks. Second, the list shows that people come to oral histories to hear the voices of diversity. Linda Turner Edmonds’s account of receiving a polio injection in the segregated South, administered by the first white people she’d ever seen, topped the list of most popular interviews.”

Other collections at the top of the rankings included: “Black History Oral Histories / Black Women” at Virginia Polytech.; “Conversations with History 2003” at U.C. Berkeley; “The Civil Rights Documentation Project” at the University of Southern Mississippi; “Women in Journalism” by the Washington Press Club Foundation; “The Whole World was Watching / an Oral History of 1968” at Brown University; “Tejano Voices” at University of Texas, Arlington; and the Columbia University Oral History Research Center’s interviews.

The Oral History Top 100 will be updated every quarter and will remain freely available at http://alexanderstreet2.com/orhilive. To view the popularity rankings in their entirety, click the “What’s Popular” button on the database’s home page.

Oral History Online is offered free to everyone through May 31 of this year at http://alexanderstreet.com. After the open access period ends on June 1, the database is available by subscription. Reviews are welcome. Please contact Jennifer Heffelfinger, manager of marketing and public relations (jheffelfinger@alexanderstreet.com or 800-889-5937 ext. 5).

AWARDED *BEST CONTENT* AND *BEST CONTRACT OPTIONS*
THE CHARLESTON ADVISOR'S 2003 READER'S CHOICE AWARDS
Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is an academic publisher of electronic full-text databases in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in June 2000, the company publishes collections in history, literature, women’s studies, sociology, ethnic and diversity studies, popular culture, film studies, the arts, and other areas. Alexander Street Press is located in Alexandria, Virginia.

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

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