Alexander Street Drama

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Alexander Street Drama brings together thousands of plays from Alexander Street’s 6 individual full-text drama collections and makes them accessible and cross-searchable in a single, specially priced package.  Included is all the content in these individual full-text collections: Black Drama, Asian American Drama, Latino Drama, Twentieth Century North American Drama, North American Indian Drama, and North American Women's Drama—nearly 6,000 works.

Approximately 85% of the plays in Alexander Street Drama are in copyright—you won’t find them free on the Web.  And well more than 40% have never been published anywhere else, in any format; you won’t see these works in print or find them in any library.  Through our exceptional relationships with the community of playwrights, when we arrange to publish an author’s works we get all the plays, including never-before-published works.  At last, students and scholars can read and study all the important plays of each writer, even those that have been produced but which have been unavailable for scholarship.

NOT JUST WORDS ON A PAGE

Alexander Street Drama also delivers a rich additional database of related ephemera, including posters, playbills, photos, theatre diagrams—an important component of Alexander Street Drama, because drama instruction is not merely the study of words on a page.  Many of these items are drawn from the private collections of the playwrights themselves and can be seen nowhere else.  Taken together, the collections that make up Alexander Street Drama give students and scholars the most exciting and complete new tools for study in this area.

POWERFUL REFERENCE DATABASE

Along with the plays and associated media resources, Alexander Street Drama includes the powerful North American Theatre Online reference tool—the largest theatre reference database ever created.  Updated regularly, it already contains hundreds of thousands of bibliographic records that are unique to this resource—rich information about authors, plays, theatres, productions, production companies, casts, and related information.

More than 40,000 pages of important reference sources are here in electronic format for the first time, indexed and searchable along with all the other content. O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources.  North American Theatre Online also links you to a world of information at hundreds of the best sites on the Web for drama research, editorially selected by our advisors.  The database is ever-growing and aims to cover the world of theatre from colonial times to the present.

NEW TOOLS FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH

Alexander Street’s famous Semantic Indexing™ and uniquely powerful search capabilities, allow users to explore and analyze the plays in ways that are simply impossible in paper form. For example:

• Find 100 scenes on the topic of funerals within 250 plays written by North American Indians.

• Find scenes set in rural areas on the subject of the Great Depression. Find scenes on the same subject set in urban areas.

• How do African American playwrights treat the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  The Vietnam War?

• How do Latino female characters who are teenagers discuss education?

There is also rich, supplementary material to inform the plays. For example, North American Indian Drama includes a full run of the Native American Playwrights Newsletter, a publication vital to scholarship that exists in only a handful of libraries.  In Latino Drama are previously unpublished, live audio recordings of early Chicano theatre companies such as Teatro Espíritu de Aztlán and Teatro Mestizo.

WHAT’S IN THIS PACKAGE TODAY?

Subscribers to Alexander Street Drama have access to everything in the following individual collections, all cross-searchable:

• Asian American Drama

• Black Drama

• Latino Literature (contains hundreds of Latino plays)

• North American Indian Drama

• North American Women's Drama

• Twentieth Century North American Drama

• North American Theatre Online

SUBSCRIPTION AND PURCHASE OPTIONS

Alexander Street Drama is available by annual subscription, with prices scaled to library budget. If your institution has already purchased perpetual rights to some of the individual collections that make up Alexander Street Drama, the subscription price to Alexander Street Drama is reduced proportionately. A library that owns all of the individual collections pays nothing at all for Alexander Street Drama.

If you are interested in a one-time purchase of perpetual rights of the individual collections, we offer special rates—with our largest discounts to libraries that purchase all of the collections. Please contact us for details.

For free trial and pricing information, contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com.