Readex Will Introduce 21st Century Tools To Online Historical Collections

Crossroads: A Community for Students, Teachers and Scholars^SM will let users find and share primary documents in new ways

NAPLES, Fla./Wednesday, June 20, 2007—Readex, a leading publisher of online historical collections, announced today that it will release Crossroads: A Community for Students, Teachers and Scholars in December 2007. Utilizing Web 2.0 techniques, this new online service will allow users to organize historical materials, tag and annotate documents and share ideas through commentary and discussion.

"Crossroads is the result of a year-long collaboration with a team of far-sighted librarians, faculty and students,” said Remmel Nunn, Readex Vice President of New Product Development. “This new service will help transform the use of online historical collections for the study of history, literature, culture and related disciplines.”

Offering a host of social bookmarking tools, Crossroads will let users build customized content subsets, comment on primary documents, create hyperlinks to other materials and engage with colleagues around the world.

“By bringing 21st-century tools to the study of the past, Crossroads will help students, teachers and scholars collaborate in revolutionary ways,” said Michelle Harper, Readex Director of Product Management. “Users' annotations will bring valuable context to primary documents, and document tagging will allow online historical materials to be uniquely searchable, rediscovered and shared."

About Readex
For more than 50 years, the Readex name has been synonymous with research in historical printed materials and government documents. Recognized by librarians, students and scholars for its efforts to transform academic research, Readex offers a wealth of Web-based, primary source materials in the humanities and social sciences. Today, Readex, a division of NewsBank, inc., has established a leadership position among publishers by creating the digital Archive of Americana, a family of online collections that provides unprecedented access to the history, culture and daily life of the United States over more than three centuries.

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For more information or to speak with a Readex expert, contact Readex Marketing Director David Loiterstein by calling 1.203.421.0152 or emailing dloiterstein@readex.com.