Lisa A. Raney

I've been having an ongoing conversation with another SRRT member about reviving the Alternative Media TaskForce as mentioned in my last post, and we've also been discussing the Alternatives in Print site made available earlier this year. He suggested that we look over the site and see if there are any areas might need to be improved, and the following is what I wrote him.

This is my first site review/critique so it is very informal. As a note, the site is very helpful if you are looking to diversify your collection. It is just a bit tedious to have to visit each individual publisher’s site as I've mentioned in my review:

Here are a few things I came up with when I was looking at the Alternatives in Print site. One thing that jumped out at me is that the searchability could be improved. Right now it appears it is only indexed by title and subject. When I search for a topic such as "anarchism", I am returned with presses that publish titles about this topic. From there, I have to go to each individual press's website to find materials about this topic. I think that it would improve usability tremendously to index the items based upon topic and include a keyword search that will retrieve individual items, though I realize that this would take a bit of time and manpower.

Under the "Front Matter" section of the site, information about the criteria for inclusion in the database is included - which I found particularly useful. It is important to note that AIP isn't balanced - books and titles are included for their political left bent ("for example, sustainable development, punk, social justice, gender studies, race relations, Third World studies, anarchism, or alternative globalization"). This whole section is pretty thorough if you haven't already looked at it. Although this is Alternatives in Print, I don't think it would hurt to include links to resources of Alternatives not in Print on the site (web resources and databases).