A Wonderful FREE Service and a Tremendous Marketing Ploy: In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Dairies, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives

You're only a click away from access with this index -- providing you're not clicking for something to which access is by subscription (and your institution hasn't subscribed). This is a wonderful public service (available at http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/firp//) – and a very good marketing device. Much of the material indexed is from Alexander Street Press collections and to use it the collections must be owned; but there's a wealth of material that is freely available! And that's why researchers will use it and welcome it. Of course, it will also become a comprehensive index to the holdings of this publisher. Good thinking Alexander Street Press --- because what's found may be bought -- http://www.alexanderstreetpress.com/.

Coverage spans the globe and extends across 400 years. It indexes English-language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories -- as noted, much in collections owned by Alexander Street and a lot in collections that are not. It currently allows for keyword searching of more than 260,000 pages of full-text by more than 9,000 individuals. And it identifies at least 2,500 audio and video files and 16,000 bibliographic records – and it will continue to grow regularly and aggressively. For freely available material, archives, repositories, publishers, and individuals have been queried to identify first person narratives from hundreds of published volumes. These are publicly available on the Web or are held by repositories and archives around the world. Obviously, NOT to be relied on solely. For instance, remember to always search WorldCat, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/worldcat.html and ArchivesUSA, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/archivesusa.html.

One may search for interviews by a diverse set of variables using a “guide” query screen (among search options are age range at time of interview, years discussed, and place of interview and terms indexed under each heading may be browsed), by repository, by collection, by interviews (sort by full text, with audio, with video), interview date (by decades or years), place (includes places discussed and place of birth) historical events, and all subjects. Entries are often extensively annotated. Access will be provided to the "voices of more than 300,000 individuals."