Humanities E-Book News Blog

ALA Midwinter 2012 Recap

2012-02-03T23:41:00.000-05:00

The American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas (January 20-23) afforded HEB the opportunity to present an update of its collection to attendees and to speak with many of our subscribers, whose feedback on content and features they’d like to see added to the collection is always welcome. In part based on comments collected at ALA, we are now in the process of reviewing prospective interface improvements with our technical partners at the University of Michigan’s MPublishing division and are working toward a web overhaul later this year.

At ALA, HEB was able to announce a new round of forthcoming titles—405 total, including 83 award-winning books—scheduled for release this spring, with new titles being added in philosophy, film and media studies, literature as well as multiple other areas. To download a complete list of these, please see http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

As before, interest in prospective handheld/mobile editions of books from our online collection was high. HEB is still working on a definitive list of titles to be converted to mobile-friendly formats, and we’ll be posting this on our website in the coming months. For the time being, a subset of handheld editions will be available for individual sale at an affordable price ($9.99) via Amazon, iBooks, and several other online retailers. We are also working on a model for offering these titles as part of a subscription package in the future.

Interest in and buzz surrounding emerging technologies both for delivery—e.g., cloud versus download—and discovery of digital content was high at ALA. HEB staff was able to confer about this with representatives of other scholarly publishing initiatives as well as with a number of commercially-oriented content providers and vendors, in our ongoing inquiry into what is most relevant to the former group and what is relevant to all readers.

Finally, HEB collected roughly 100 entries for our iPad raffle. The drawing has now been held and we’re pleased to announce the winner: Lynette Nickell, Children's and Young Adult Services Librarian at the Ector County Library in Odessa, Texas.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to see us.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2012

2012-01-09T15:33:00.000-05:00

HEB will once again participate as an exhibitor at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, TX, January 20-23.

More than 400 books will be added next spring to our collection—bringing the total to over 3,700—and we will have an updated list of these forthcoming titles available that we'd like to share with you. Drop by to hear what else is new at HEB and pick up our giveaways.

If you are attending ALA, please stop by booth 1360 or write to Patti Whittier (pwhittier@hebook.org) to set up an appointment. We look forward to seeing you!

For meeting details and registration, please visit ALA's website http://www.alamidwinter.org.

HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2011

2011-12-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book recently reported and paid its latest round of royalties to our participating publishers and individual authors. Below we once again list the top ten most frequently hit titles in our collection of over 3,300 titles for this latest royalty period.

Several titles from previous periods remain in the top ten: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) is again in first place; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge), John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon), and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books) have all previously appeared on this list.

Among the new entries rounding out this diverse roster of classic and contemporary works, history, cultural studies, gender studies, as well as race and ethnicity clearly remain of interest to HEB subscribers. One new addition is George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books), perhaps also reflecting a growing interest in LGBT studies among humanistic scholars. HEB will in fact be adding to its list of LGBT/Queer Studies titles in the coming year, one of several areas we are in the process of expanding.

Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)

Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)

McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)

Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)

McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)

Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994)

Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken Books, 1995)

HEB Launches New Handheld Editions Program

2011-11-15T12:23:00.000-05:00

The first titles from HEB's online collection converted for use with handheld devices are now available for purchase from various distributors. Among this initial set are a number of seminal works now out-of-print and out-of-copyright—and often hard to find—which we are making available in an affordable downloadable edition, such as William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England; Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica; John Hobson, Imperialism: A Study; Hubert Jedin's History of the Council of Trent, Volumes I and II; Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy; M. Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Volumes I and II; and Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management.

We will be offering additional titles for use with mobile devices and posting details about our handheld editions program on our website in the near future. Please stay tuned.

New on HEB: The English Institute's Work of Genre

2011-10-20T23:07:00.000-04:00

HEB is pleased to announce the release of our latest XML title, The Work of Genre, edited by Robyn Warhol and published by The English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This represents the second born-digital installment in the English Institute's ongoing series of publications derived from its annual conferences and comprises selected papers from the 2009 conference held at Harvard University. (For more information the launch of this digital series and its initial installment, On Periodization, please see the following link.) This volume features seven essays, in addition to the editor's introduction, exploring questions such as: How do genres come into being, and what distinguishes them one from another? What do considerations of genre occlude, as well as reveal? What kinds of generic categories might be useful for critical analysis today?

HEB will continue to offer further installments of this series, edited by Meredith L. McGill of Rutgers University, on an annual basis.

HEB Pricing for 2011-2012

2011-08-17T16:14:00.000-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book is experiencing growing pains! This year, we have seen a dramatic increase in the size of the collection. With an average of 500 new titles added each year, the HEB program has now surpassed 3,300 titles of recognized high quality in the humanities. HEB just celebrated its 10th anniversary, passing the 1 million page mark!

Our growth reflects the popularity of HEB’s list and the continual improvement in content, search and access. The collection has expanded to include the highest-quality work in anthropology, linguistics, film and media studies, as well as sociology and philosophy. Additionally, HEB will continue to seek the best works in the humanities to create the most robust collection available in one package.

HEB will be making only moderate price increases this year, continuing to offer the most cost-effective resource in the humanities today. These price increases (effective as of August 1, 2011) are necessary to manage the growth in our operation, ongoing expansion of content and list development. As HEB has not raised its subscription rates in nearly five years, this reflects greater value based on the rapidly expanding list offered to its members. HEB continues to maintain competitive pricing despite the exponential growth of the collection. You can find our pricing on our website: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/pricingsubscriptions.html.

We continue to appreciate your loyalty and support of the ACLS Humanities E-Book program and its commitment to quality. And as always, we appreciate your feedback, thoughts and comments.

Drop us a line at: info@hebook.org.

New MARC Records, June 2011

2011-07-01T11:14:00.001-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 291 books to its collection, bringing the total to 3,334 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including important new series from Cambridge University Press, Fordham University Press, and University of California Press. All current subscribers now have access to all of the new books added to the collection.

Cataloging records are available to HEB subscribers for download, including one zip file for the 542 new round 8 titles and a second zip file for all 3,334 titles in the collection. Instructions for obtaining these records are included below. As you know, it is very important to load the MARC records into your catalog as soon as possible, because most users become familiar with, and begin to access, the site from the library catalog.

As a reminder, the records are now in UTF-8 format, rather MARC-8 format as in previous releases. If you have any questions, please email us at info@hebook.org.

New records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available via your browser at http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683.

• If you are a new subscriber or if you have not recently updated your MARC records, you need to download acls1-8.zip (includes 3,149 records for all 3,334 books in rounds 1-8, online as of June 2011).

• If you only need to add the new titles, and your records are up-to-date with the last download in March 2010, you simply need to download the file acls8.zip, which includes all 502 records for the 542 books added in April and June 2011.

PLEASE NOTE: The MARC records for our latest release, round 8, are in Unicode-UTF-8 format rather than the older MARC-8 format. To accommodate those subscribers not wishing to overwrite existing MARCs in a new format, we are making rounds 1-7 and round 8 available separately. However, for consistency, subscribers may want to download the cumulative file acls1-8.zip in the UTF-8 format.

Downloads each contain three files:

a. The records in MARC 21 communications format.

b. The same records in ASCII format.

c. A readme.txt in ASCII format (explains what is contained in each of the above).

There is a discrepancy between the number of records and the number of books in the collection due to the fact that multi-volume works have a single record. A complete set will include 3,071 records for 3,334 books.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2011

2011-05-23T11:05:00.002-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 17th round of royalties to more than 80 publishers and 170 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 6 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection, which now has over 3,000 titles.

Attention focused on cultural studies, world history, nationalism, gender and urbanism. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remained in first place. Perennial bestseller Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge) moved from second to third place, while John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon) up to second place.

University presses accounted for four of the ten titles, with one each from Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, NYU Press and Oxford University Press.

Verso had two books in the top ten with City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles joining Imagined Communities. In addition to Verso, commercial presses in the top ten included Pantheon, Routledge, Beacon and Basic Books.

Considering the changing nature of humanitistic scholarship, it is interesting to note that many of these titles are older works and classic works in their fields. For example, Imagined Communities is a revised edition (2006) of a work originally published in 1983 and Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France was published in 1976.

And here’s the list:

Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early American (Harvard University Press, 2003)
Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990)
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 2006)

Growing Success of HEB Individual Subscriptions

2011-04-25T17:28:00.000-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book is proud to announce that thirty-four of the seventy ACLS constituent societies are now represented among individual subscribers to the HEB collection. This includes societies of all sizes, ranging from 400 to 30,000 members.

Since June 2009, HEB has offered members of all learned societies the ability to purchase individual subscriptions to the collection for just $35 for a 12-month subscription, which entitles the individual subscriber to the full text of over 3,300 fully cross-searchable titles across all fields in the humanities. Once a subscriber, members can access the collection from home, office or while traveling.

More information about individual subscriptions is available at http://www.humanitiesebook.org/sub-ind.html.

HEB at ACRL 2011

2011-04-11T15:46:00.001-04:00

HEB was an exhibitor at this year's ACRL conference in Philadelphia from March 31–April 1. A number of subscribers stopped by our booth to tell us that they value the collection and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them in the future.

During the meeting HEB was pleased to be able to report that we are currently in the process of creating handheld editions of an initial batch of around fifty titles from our online collection, slated for release in May or June. The books will be competitively priced and available for individual purchase from various online retailers. They will be the first of about 300 titles that HEB is placing into its handheld program in order to investigate the viability of this format for scholarly monographs and to test the efficiencies and costs of a replicable and scalable workflow. This project follows up on the findings of our survey and white paper devoted to the issue of scholarly monographs in handheld devices completed August 2010.

HEB discussed with subscribers and other interested librarians its prospective plans to offer titles for download to mobile/handheld devices. There is currently no provision for making downloadable titles available as part of a subscription package, since all content is already available to unlimited users online through our regular subscription terms. HEB sees the handheld as the digital equivalent to its POD (print-on-demand) program, that is, as another method of expanding its core online service to additional audiences and uses for those who desire such formats.

HEB also reviewed with librarians several new digital publishing initiatives currently in the planning stages or underway at various universities, university presses and other academic institutions. While many new publisher initiatives are planning the creation of extensive frontlist offerings for digital purchase, HEB remains committed to its role in providing an extensive, very reasonably priced, curated list of the highest-quality titles in the humanities that have passed the test of time and that will have greater assurance of access and use by library patrons. Through its rigorous peer-review process, coordinated with ACLS's seventy constituent learned societies, HEB will continue to offer the best of humanities scholarship in a single, not-for-profit platform for years to come.

Stay tuned for further developments on any of the above and keep up to date by visiting or subscribing to this blog.

HEB and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

2011-03-07T13:48:00.007-05:00

As part of its ongoing policy of urging the inter-institutional coordination of digital scholarly resources (see “Ten Years Later: The Future Is Past,” HEB News 3.2, Spring 2009), HEB was very pleased to be part of the initial Digital Public Library of America planning workshop in early March at Harvard University, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The meeting included many key people from the world of digital humanities—including scholars, librarians and university presses—as well as people from public libraries and commercial interests.

There was a lively discussion on the content and scope of a potential DPLA, but this was just a first step in defining this bold initiative spearheaded by historian Robert Darnton. A report of the results of the first meeting can be found online at:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dpla/March_1_Workshop_Notes.

There is an opportunity to subscribe to the DPLA listserv at:
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lists/subscribe/dpla-discussion.

Professor Darnton's talk and article on DPLA (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library) will also be of interest to scholars and librarians concerned about our digital future.

HEB’s Fair-Use Policy

2011-02-07T13:27:00.000-05:00

A thorough understanding of copyright and fair-use rights continues to be important to the work of students, scholars and authors. HEB has recently updated the description of its printing and downloading policies in the Help section of our website, in order to provide more information to users of the HEB collection.

ACLS Humanities E-Book follows fair-use rights and restrictions for all books on the site. Since most material on this site is licensed from participating publishers for electronic distribution only, fair-use restrictions should be carefully followed by users for any printing. This means that you may print pages for your personal research use only. If, as an instructor, you want to use material in a course, you can provide the permanent URL on the title record page and the appropriate page numbers to students. If you want to photocopy pages for your course, you must apply directly to the original publisher for permission.

Under the “page pdf” viewing option for titles in the collection, the default setting is set to both view and print three pages at a time. This is generally sufficient for following a citation or extracting a quotation and follows HEB’s policy for fair-use rights and limitations. If in doubt, or for further information, see our section on fair use.

HEB at ALA Midwinter

2010-12-15T15:21:00.000-05:00

HEB will be attending the 2011 ALA Midwinter meeting in San Diego, CA, from January 7 to 10. With over 3,000 titles, one million pages and over 80,000 images now online, HEB continues to grow across all humanities disciplines. HEB now has almost 650 institutional subscribers and is averaging over 7.5 million hits per year.

HEB directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto will be attending the meeting and will also be available at Booth 1246. Please e-mail us to set up a meeting or come by during exhibit hours.

For meeting details and registration, please visit ALA’s website.

HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2010

2010-12-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 16th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5.5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection, which now has over 2,800 titles.

Attention focused on nationalism, race, gender, war, urbanism and media. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remained in first place. Perennial bestseller Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge) moved up to second place from fifth, while Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press) slipped only one notch from second to third place.

Verso had two books in the top ten with City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles joining Imagined Communities. University presses accounted for five of the ten titles, with two from Princeton University Press and one each from University of California Press, NYU Press and Oxford University Press.

In addition to Verso, commercial presses in the top ten included Pantheon, Schocken and Routledge.

Considering the changing nature of humanistic scholarship, it is interesting to note that many of these titles are older works: Imagined Communities is a revised edition (2006) of a work originally published in 1983. Of the remaining nine titles, seven are ten or more years old, with two from the 1980s and four from the 1990s.

And here’s the list:

Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983, 2006)
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006)
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986)
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005)
Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000)
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken, 1995)

XML Title Review and Updates

2010-11-10T13:01:00.050-05:00

HEB’s XML specifications have undergone a number of revisions since the launch of the collection in 2002, and ongoing technical development at the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (SPO), which disseminates the HEB collection online, have also affected formatting and functionality of our XML titles over the years. Therefore, to ensure our books meet our most recent—and replicable — standards, HEB decided to undertake an extensive review and overhaul of all previously published XML titles according to our updated and standardized XML Tools, Functions, and Capabilities.

The XML Title List includes 78 live as of September 2010 and an additional 18 XML titles currently either in production or in development.

The review process itself took place in May and June 2010, and resulting corrections were completed in November 2010. The findings of this review are of value not only to users of the HEB collection but also to those publishers already using, or contemplating deploying, an XML production workflow.

Based on our review, broken external links proved to be the most widespread problem afflicting previously published XML titles. In order to address this, HEB contacted the titles’ originating presses (and in some cases, authors directly) regarding obsolete URLs. All updates we received were incorporated along with any other revisions stemming from straightforward tagging oversights in the XML file itself (though very few titles required further non-URL-related fixes).

HEB had also selected four titles for implementing pop-up divisions, a recently added feature allowing for the display of any “additional materials” in pop-up windows.

There were also a number of revisions to be addressed by SPO, associated with remote processing or the hosting environment rather than with the XML source files and therefore requiring a separate approach. For the most part, these are a result of overarching functionality issues affecting titles across the board rather than being specific to any particular book(s), and the revision process is therefore ongoing.

In all, twelve titles have been re-released with updates and corrections as part of this effort to improve site functionality and reader experience. Additional titles will reflect improvements once the current cycle of development work at SPO is complete. For further information, please contact ngielen@hebook.org.

New Titles Forthcoming January 2011

2010-10-27T11:43:00.001-04:00

HEB’s eighth round of new titles is forthcoming in January 2011. This includes 543 electronic books covering a wide range of disciplines and fields. Among the most prominent new additions are another 141 titles in Film and Media Studies, 46 more in Philosophy, 57 in Central and Eastern European Studies, 41 in Music and Musicology, 33 in Jewish Studies, as well as 29 more in Bibliography and 30 in Linguistics and Literature.

With these new additions HEB will retain its core concentrations in History and expand strong collections in Women’s Studies (254 titles total), Literature (138), Music and Musicology (127), Latin American Studies (114), Middle Eastern (112) and Mediterranean-Byzantine Studies (67), and Methods and Theory (84), among other fields across the Humanities.

In all, this brings the HEB collection to nearly 3,335 titles, with nearly 1.2 million pages and 90,000 images, in three full-text formats (page-image, text, PDF), fully cross-searchable, with hyperlinks to online reviews in the major journals and complete MARC records.

Click here to download the forthcoming list as an Excel spreadsheet sortable by author, title, or ISBN.

HEB Publishes White Paper 3

2010-10-19T10:11:00.000-04:00

HEB announces the publication of its third white paper, Handheld E-Book Readers and Scholarship: Report and Reader Survey, written by Nina Gielen, HEB Editor for Digital Content and Production. This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by HEB in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers.

Scholarly content generally involves extensive networking and cross-referencing between individual works through various channels, including bibliographical citation and subsequent analysis and discussion. Through past experience with its online collection, HEB had already determined that a web-based platform lends itself well to presenting this type of material, but was interested in exploring which key elements would need to be replicated in the handheld edition in order to maintain the same level of functionality, as well as what specific factors from either print or digital publishing would have to be taken into account. As sample content, HEB selected six titles from its own online collection, three in a page-image format with existing OCR-derived text and three encoded as XML files, and had these converted by an outside vendor with minimal editorial intervention into both MOBI (prc) and ePub files.

The white paper reports on two phases of the study: an in-house evaluation of various e-book readers by HEB staff, and a reader survey. The white paper also includes an overview of the process of converting titles for handheld e-readers, including conversion costs.

HEB’s initial findings indicate that titles formatted for then-existing handheld devices are not yet adequate for scholarly use in terms of replicating either the benefits of online collections — cross-searchability, archiving, multifarious interactive components — nor certain aspects of print editions that users reported missing, such as being able to mark up and rapidly skim text. A turnaround is underway once a common and more robust format optimized for handheld readers is determined and devices themselves continue to evolve, adding improved display options and better and more intuitive web-access, searching and other interactive use of content.

For reports on the white paper, see Digital Koans (September 6, 2010) and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The white paper is available free online in either HTML or searchable, downloadable PDF and in print for a modest fee.

The English Institute Goes Born-Digital

2010-09-08T11:00:00.000-04:00

HEB announces the publication of a new born-digital, XML title: On Periodization, edited by Virginia Jackson of Tufts University and published by The English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This partnership between HEB and the English Institute is especially important: it represents our first born-digital title in literary studies and the Institute’s first venture into publishing the multimedia that reflect the growing importance of the digital in literary analysis.

This book is the latest in the series of English Institute publications. For seven decades, The English Institute has been a major resource for developments in criticism, theory, and scholarship, while honoring traditional fields of interest and modes of literary analysis. This volume presents selected papers from the 2008 annual English Institute conference, held at Harvard University. It includes the work of seven scholars from among papers presented at the conference. Previous volumes — already offered in our English Institute series — include many of the most important literary critics of the past three generations. According to English Institute Trustee William Germano, “This collaboration is a terrific opportunity for us. With digital access, hyperlinks, and audio and visual enhancements, our new series brings the English Institute into the electronic present.”

The English Institute and HEB are already at work on the next born-digital title in the series, which will present papers from the 2009 conference. This new, born-digital series is edited by Meredith L. McGill of Rutgers University.

HEB is pleased to be hosting this distinguished series and to be The English Institute’s partner in this continuing collaboration. See a complete list of our XML titles.

Highest Praise for Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital

2010-08-23T12:52:00.001-04:00

R. Burr Litchfield’s Florence Ducal Capital has received another rave review. Laurie Nussdorfer, analyzing the book in the latest issue of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, writes, “If there were a book ideally suited to appear in a digital edition, it is this magisterial study of the social geography of Florence in the first century of the Medici grand dukes.… The E-Book partners brilliantly with Litchfield’s online gazetteer… [a] magnificent resource.… The book’s real value…is to provide a model for how to analyze and visualize a society in transition. As such, Litchfield’s example will hopefully inspire similar studies of other urban communities and ultimately foster a genuinely comparative history of urban change.”

We could not agree more. This title is both born-digital and open-access. See a complete list of our XML titles.

Scott Palmer Surveys the Digital Humanities

2010-08-16T13:27:00.000-04:00

In the latest News Net (May/June 2010, 50.3) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Scott Palmer’s “Academic Publishing in the Digital Age” surveys the current landscape of digital humanities: JSTOR, MUSE, the JSAH, the university presses and the “digital transition,” various e-book platforms and e-readers, including the Kindle and iPad. He examines the Institute for the Future of the Book, George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, Web 2 and 3 capabilities, the impact of mega-corporations like Microsoft, Apple and Google, and the efforts of government and private foundations, including NEH, MacArthur, Mellon and ACLS. Among the “impressive” multimedia projects he cites is ACLS Humanities E-Book’s XML series.

Prof. Palmer then devotes many of his final remarks to the importance of a new digital literacy among humanists themselves and the opportunities and challenges that this new fluency carry for the academy. “We should be prepared to be buffeted by continuing whirlwinds of change,” he concludes.

Scott Palmer comes to the topic with first-hand knowledge and experience: he is the author of HEB’s XML multimedia version of Dictatorship of the Air (Cambridge UP, HEB e-book, 2007) and now serves as editor-in-chief of The Russian Front website.

Who’s Reading HEB

2010-08-06T13:41:00.034-04:00

While we do not track individual users or sessions, every month we compile statistics on the breakdown of our subscribers by FTE size, by Carnegie classification, by more general type of institutions, and by country. These numbers offer some interesting information on our readership, where it is concentrated geographically, and at what types of schools. received another rave review.

HEB currently has 633 institutional subscribers with a combined FTE of 5,335,916, according to the latest figures available. Of these 633 institutions nearly three-quarters (463, or 73.1%) are at college and universities, and these have a combined FTE enrollment of just over 3.5 million. The second-highest concentration of institutional subscribers is among the 125 non-U.S. schools for a combined FTE of just over 1.7 million, or 19.4% of the total. After that the next-highest grouping is among secondary schools (28, or 4.42%) with a total enrollment of 19,308.The latter tend to be the traditional prep schools where the humanities continue to hold a central place in the curriculum.

If we look at the classifications by type of institution, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. As one might expect, the largest concentration by FTE (1.7 million) is among the 80 Extensive schools: the highest level research institutions offering doctoral degrees. (32 Intensive schools provided 5% of the total or an FTE of 438,205). Yet the highest number of schools (113) is among the Master’s I designation: the smaller public and some private baccalaureate colleges that also grant Masters degrees. The next largest in numbers (89) is currently among institutions granting Associate’s degrees. Though small in FTE (460,772 total), the number of these schools is significant, since it appears to indicate (borne out by direct anecdotal information) that schools are using HEB for collection development to stretch acquisitions dollars or to serve new constituencies and accrediting criteria. In the middle stand the three levels of baccalaureate institutions, the various levels of traditional liberal arts colleges (113 schools in all or 17.8%), for a combined FTE of 190,152. In the past, many of these schools, we were told, acquired HEB not so much for its content (many of these titles are already in their print collections), as for HEB’s exemplary nature as a highly peer-reviewed digital collection. While quality remains key, these liberal arts libraries are also now leading a trend in acquisitions away from print and toward the digital.

Returning to those 125 non-US schools, subscribers are spread across the globe in 29 countries. As one might expect, Anglophone nations predominate, with the United Kingdom (30), Canada (25), Australia (12), and Ireland (7) together accounting for 59% of non-US institutions and a combined FTE of 1.26 million. All the continents are included. China, where HEB has begun a new initiative, has 8 institutional subscribers. In India HEB is currently in the middle of several large-scale, college consortial trials.

FTE is no guarantee that anyone at an institution is reading online or using HEB, yet our usage stats bear out the general picture: from 2008 to 2009 hits across the entire collection, then about 2300 titles, rose almost 54%, from 3.3 million to 5.1 million, while the total number of subscribing institutions (and FTE) stayed fairly stable, rising about 3%. This means that the collection continues to be more and more intensively used and embedded in online catalogs and course syllabi. In further HEB News posts, we’ll continue to report regularly on the top titles being used in the collection.

New and Improved Site Features

2010-07-07T10:11:00.005-04:00

Thanks to ongoing structural improvements on our website provided by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, our readers will now notice several overall upgrades in interface and performance. These include multiple viewing sizes, the improvement of image quality—most especially in books with numerous grayscale illustrations—and a smoother and more consistent page transition. We’ve also added many new online reviews to new and previously added titles.

Readers will also note new features and improvements in our library of XML titles, including many new links to related scholarship within HEB; newly formatted page-break indicators in print-derived XML books (in direct response to reader feedback); and improved pop-up functionality.

These join the improved functionalities added over the past two years: page-viewing options that now include page-image, PDF, and text views (allowing citation copy-and-paste within Fair-Use guidelines); the ability to print and download up to three pages at a time; and the addition of numerous publisher series. All in all we think these changes make our site even more user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate. We welcome your continued comments and suggestions for further improvements.

Pohlandt-McCormick, I Saw a Nightmare...: Doing Violence to Memory, new on HEB

2010-05-12T11:27:00.010-04:00

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick

“I Saw a Nightmare...”: Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. HEB 2010.

The Soweto uprising was both a tragic and heroic event in the history of South Africa. Tragic, because of the violence associated with it; heroic, because of the way it grew out of the oppression of the past and marked a decisive step towards a democratic future. This electronic book has two identities. On the one hand it provides a comprehensive, though by no means complete, account of the uprising. On the other, it is an attempt to come to terms with the interrelationship between violence and memory in South Africa.

This born-digital work is envisioned as two buildings, interconnected, perhaps even standing under the same roof. The buildings have many floors, large and small rooms, alcoves, basements and common rooms. They are interconnected by a series of passageways, staircases, larger and smaller doors. Thus, this book does not offer merely another alternative interpretation of the story of Soweto, no single narrative of the past or single interpretation, but rather the multiple stories that were told and the contested meanings that were attributed to the events of Soweto. It seeks to describe and establish relationships among these multiple narratives as well as the processes of societal and individual remembering and forgetting, looking at the many levels, layers, spaces, and times in which they took place.

The electronic medium, with its ability to create multiple linkages at many levels and to surpass the simple linearity of a book, attempts to replicate the many layers of meaning associated with the uprising. Some of them have changed through time, some complement each other, others conflict.

This e-book provides extensive supplementary materials, accessible via pop-up windows (including thousands of photographs, with the option of browsing for these by keyword or type); official documents; essays; and interviews. It takes advantage of extensive interactive cross-referencing within the text to promote non-linear navigation, including “red thread” sections showing a list of all related sections throughout the e-book. It also provides a wealth of related historical documents in the form of PDFs, and a glossary.

A Gutenberg-e title.

Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

Gengenbach, Binding Memories, now on HEB

2010-05-12T11:17:00.007-04:00

Heidi Gengenbach

Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. HEB 2010.

Building on the insights of feminist scholars who had used personal narratives to explore women’s constructions of the past, this book argues that during the last two centuries women in the rural communities of southern Mozambique had not suffered as silent, helpless, or, at best, coping victims of Gaza Nguni conquest, Portuguese colonialism, South African mining capital, and patriarchal clan rule.

How did women experience and explain the sometimes colliding, sometimes colluding forces of ostensibly masculine power that had transformed the region, so often destructively, since the early nineteenth century? Were imperialism and capitalism, guns and gold, tradition and patriarchy really as omnipotent in determining the exterior and interior landscapes of women’s lives as scholars had claimed? Would the dynamics of precolonial or colonial political power, proletarianization, mission Christianity, agriculture, or African marriage and family look the same if one examines them from the point of view of rural women?

Do some people remember differently—not in the sense that the details of their memories differ, but in terms of the tools of their memory, the forms their remembering takes? What, for instance, if some people choose not to put experience solely into story, or not to articulate their memories through language at all? The work of remembering, like the work of history, involves sorting through and making sense of the jumble of what happened. We take what we know, we arrange it, we come up with an explanation, and we store that explanation somehow—because we created it for a purpose, and for an audience of some kind. After all, we do the work of remembering in company, as members of a community, never in a social vacuum and never entirely on our own. But who is to say that these explanations, these records of interpreted experience, must be organized and presented as narrative, in discourse rather than some other form? Is narrative our only medium of access to the past, the only meaningful shape remembrance—or history—can assume?

How does a Western academic historian present in writing historical knowledge that comes in the shape of a clay pot or a line in the soil and that obeys imperatives different from her own? While sections of this book on women’s life-storytelling do rely on existing Africanist scholarship for models of historical narrative, none of these models perfectly fit the culture of female storytelling. Collectively they raise a crucial question: To what extent can or should academic historians subordinate their subjects’ conventions of historical narrative to the formal conventions of their discipline?

Includes image maps to facilitate non-linear navigation, audio clip interviews, and a Flash animated map. Dozens of supplementary materials are accessible via pop-up windows, including the author’s field notes, interview transcriptions, and newspaper clippings. Includes a glossary and over 500 color and black and white images.

A Gutenberg-e title.
Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

HEB Offers Libraries Free, Two-Month Trials

2010-04-30T10:59:00.004-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book is offering institutions a free, two-month trial of the collection during May and June in anticipation of the Summer/Fall acquisition season.

If you would like to request a trial, please email your name, email address and institutional affiliation to subscriptions@hebook.org. Once your response is processed you will receive a username and password to access the collection online.

As your library plans for the expansion of its digital collection, we hope you'll consider ACLS Humanities E-Book. For a complete list of titles available, please visit http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

HEB Handheld Reading Device Survey: Summary of Results

2010-04-21T16:30:00.009-04:00

HEB recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPhone. (For details, please visit the HEB website.)

We offered participants a choice of three sample titles to download, all taken from our online collection and reformatted for portable e-book readers, with each available in two different formats, ePub and prc/MOBI. The survey was completed by 142 respondents, 86 of whom (i.e., more than 60%) described themselves as librarians. Independent scholars, instructors, students, writers, and technology consultants were among the remaining participants.

Full details of the survey results and handheld conversion process will be featured in a forthcoming white paper, but here are some of the more important findings.

Respondents were asked to rate their experiences with both content and functionality. Most indicated that they were quite satisfied with straight-forward reading and navigation, in spite of formatting limitations resulting from converting to ePub and prc. In terms of e-reader functionality, responses reflected a certain amount of frustration with interactive features, such as compiling and working with annotations, and options for reference and citation.

Overall, survey participants reacted more or less favorably to HEB’s sample titles, and about 75% expressed an interest in downloading additional monographs. (Forty-six percent answered they would definitely be interested in this, and an additional 29% expressed interest if the titles were free or priced below $10.)

HEB also surveyed participants regarding their general reading preferences, and current use of handheld readers for research purposes appeared to be relatively low. When asked to compare the two formats, 69% of participants who also had access to HEB’s online collection seemed to prefer this for research and scholarly use. This does not come as a surprise, since a number of features considered important to digital scholarship by survey participants (e.g., access to external resources, searching across titles, and color images) were either restricted or unavailable altogether on then-current handheld devices. However, among the same subgroup, for casual/general reading, those preferring the handheld edition outnumbered those preferring the online edition three to one.

After closing the survey, HEB conducted a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to Apple, Sony, or Amazon, and the winners have been notified. Thanks again to all our participants.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2010

2010-04-14T11:43:00.007-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 15th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection.

Worth noting is that Islam and the Middle East (consistently on the list since 2003) has fallen off the top ten. Hodgson’s Venture of Islam, a constant in the top ten in the past, is now at 13th place. Meanwhile, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather maintains its strong performance. This period it has been joined by several other titles in colonial, race, and gender studies (a trend continued among the next ten on the list). At the same time, other disciplines or methodologies — especially sociology and media studies — have emerged as leaders. Apropos is the appearance here of two presses new to the top ten: NYU and Verso.

Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso)
Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press)
Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press)
Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press)
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon)
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press)
Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia)
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press)
Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

New MARC Records

2010-04-07T11:49:00.006-04:00

As previously reported, ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 576 books to its collection, bringing the total to 2790 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas. All current subscribers now have access to all of the new books added to the collection.

Cataloging records are available to HEB subscribers for download, and instructions for obtaining these records are included below. As you know, it is very important to load the MARC records into your catalog as soon as possible, because most users become familiar with, and begin to access, the site from the library catalog.

New records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available via your browser at:

http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683

• If you are a new subscriber or if you have not recently updated your MARC records, in order to download all ACLS Humanities E-Book records to date you need to download acls1-7.zip.

• If you only need to add the new titles, and your records are up-to-date with the last download in Winter 2009, you simply need to download acls7.zip

Downloads contain three files:

a. The records in USMARC communications format

b. The same records in ASCII format

c. readme.txt - in ASCII format (explains what is contained in each of the above).

HEB Round 7 Titles Released

2010-03-19T13:38:00.006-04:00

We are happy to announce the launch of the latest round of titles on HEB: 576 new works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including important new series from the American Sociological Association, Cambridge University Press, the English Institute, and the Society of Biblical Literature.

With the addition of these new works HEB's list now stands at 2790 titles, with over 1 million pages and over 45,000 images. It offers titles in over two dozen disciplinary or area studies, many new to this round, including many titles in performance studies (theater, music, dance, performance), film and media studies, literary criticism, sociology, bibliographical studies, history of the book, and biblical studies. We continue to add titles in all areas of history, women's studies, Jewish studies, and many other fields. HEB now includes monographs, critical studies, primary sources, reference works and volumes of essays. The entire collection is full-text and completely cross-searchable. It is also browsable and searchable by series.

HEB continues to offer peer-reviewed titles of the highest quality from nearly 100 scholarly publishers. These titles have been chosen by our partners among twenty participating ACLS learned societies for their continued value in teaching and research. Selection and digitization for the next round of HEB titles is already underway.

Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese now on HEB.

2010-02-26T12:19:00.009-05:00

Tonio Andrade

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. HEB 2010.

In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?

This new XML title traces the history of Taiwan in this pivotal period of European rule, 1623 to 1662. While also considering a short-lived Spanish colony in northern Taiwan (1626–42), Andrade focuses on the Dutch colony (1624–62) and the emergence therein of a Sino-Dutch hybrid colony, a process he calls “co-colonization.” This process was born out of economic and administrative cooperation between Dutch and Chinese colonists, but it also involved coercion: This is not a book just about peaceful coexistence.

These stories of cooperation and competition shed light on one of the most important questions of global history: How do we understand the great colonial movements that have shaped our modern world? Historians have focused on European colonialism, paying little attention to non-western counter examples. Andrade studies Taiwan because it is a place where European and non-European colonialism met, where two different civilizations encountered “people without history,” and thus an ideal microcosm for understanding colonialism.

Much of the documentary evidence for this book comes from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Collection of the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague, as well as from other archives, such as the Arsip Nasional of Indonesia, the Archivo General de Indias, and Chinese sources, many of which can be found online at the Academia Sinica’s Scripta Sinica.

This XML title contains 27 maps, many contemporary, accessible in two different hi-res image viewers, and 37 color and b&w figures, many from Caspar Schmalkalden’s Die Wundersamen Reisen… of 1642–52 and from the Academia Sinica’s collection of Genre Paintings of Taiwan Aborigines, modern photos, graphs, and tables. The book also offers a hyperlinked conceptual, topical and thematic index, Unicode Chinese, and hyperlinks to external resources.

A Gutenberg-e title.

Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

Reminder: HEB Handheld Reading Device Survey

2010-02-01T13:46:00.003-05:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book requests your participation in a survey, which has been designed to test the viability of presenting titles from our collection in new formats for use on handheld e-book readers, including the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Apple iPhone. Your participation will help us to gather valuable feedback on the use of scholarly titles on handheld devices.

To participate, please visit www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html. Here you can download one or more free HEB titles to your e-book reader and access the survey. (If you've already downloaded a title, please remember to go back and answer the survey questions!) Titles include: The Arabs and Medieval Europe by Norman Daniel, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America by Lewis Hanke, and The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi.

To thank you for your time and considered responses, we'll be doing a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to a retailer of your choice: Amazon, Sony, or Apple. Be sure to fill out the contact information on the last screen of the survey to enter the raffle. Individual responses are strictly confidential. The overall results and analysis will be made available in a subsequent white paper.

Thank you for your participation.

ACLS Humanities E-Book

HEB Enters the History of the Book in America

2010-01-22T10:41:00.009-05:00

In their authoritative essay, "The History of the Book in America" in the newly published The Oxford Companion to the Book, (ed. Michael F. Suarez, SJ and H.R. Woudhuysen, 2 vols. [Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 1:425-42), Scott E. Casper and Joan Shelley Rubin survey and analyze the history of book production and culture in America from its 17th-century beginnings into the 21st century. They trace trends and milestones from John Eliot's Indian Bible (1661-63) printed in Cambridge, MA, through Benjamin Franklin and Peter Zenger, through the growth of Harper, Putnam, Houghton Mifflin, Lippincott, Holt, Knopf and Random House, Time-Warner and the other great American presses of the 20th century. In their survey they discuss the industrial book, literacy and modes of reading, the public library, trends in publishing, marketing and reading, consolidation and globalization, and conclude with a section on "The Future of the Book." Desktop publishing, POD and e-books follow in rapid succession, culminating in several examples of this future: Stephen King, Google Book, and (in some detail, p. 441) the American Council of Learned Societies' "History E-book project" (now, of course, ACLS Humanities E-Book). We're impressed to find ourselves in such good publishing and historical company and to be publicly recognized as a culminating element of the history of the book in America.

Directors to Introduce HEB Portal at ALA

2010-01-06T14:10:00.004-05:00

HEB will be attending this year's ALA Midwinter meeting in Boston, MA, from January 15 to 18. In its review of ACLS Humanities E-Book (September 2009) the Institute of Historical Research (London) called HEB "one of the best - if not the best - electronically accessible sites in the humanities." For its tenth anniversary, HEB is now completing details for a "universal" collaboration with university presses and learned societies to create a collection with complete publisher lists and a new purchase and perpetual access model. This new "HEB Portal" will facilitate the distribution of scholarly monographs and related materials to the scholarly and library community. Please visit Booth 2553 to discuss details with Directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto.

Directors Announce HEB Portal at CNI

2009-12-15T15:38:00.012-05:00

HEB Directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto presented a session at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in Washington on December 14. At the session they rolled out our evolving ideas for the HEB Portal: a universal press participation plan that would facilitate the digital publication and distribution of complete, new publisher lists to the scholarly community. The plan has been well received so far, and the CNI panel helped move key questions forward. More detailed discussions with publishers and librarians are progressing.

Read a live blog of the panel.

Download the complete presentation in PDF format.

Participate in Survey to Test HEB Titles on E-Book Readers!

2009-11-02T15:07:00.033-05:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book invites you to participate in a survey, which has been designed to test the viability of presenting titles from our online collection in new formats for use on various handheld e-book readers, including the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Apple iPhone. Your participation will help us to gather valuable feedback on the use of scholarly titles on handheld devices.

Please visit www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html to download one or more free HEB titles to your e-book reader and to access the survey.

To thank you for your time and considered responses, we'll be doing a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to a retailer of your choice: Amazon, Sony, or Apple. Be sure to fill out the contact information on the last screen of the survey to enter the raffle. Individual responses are strictly confidential. The overall results and analysis will be made available in a subsequent white paper. Thank you for your participation. ACLS Humanities E-Book

HEB Conference Attendance Schedule 2009-2010

2009-10-23T10:33:00.005-04:00

ACLS Humanites E-Book will be attending and exhibiting at several conferences this year. The current schedule is as follows:

Conference of Administrative Officers (CAO) of the ACLS

November 5-8, 2009

Portland, OR

Directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto will be speaking.

Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2009 Membership Meeting

December 14-15, 2009

Washington, DC

Directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto will be speaking on December 14th.

ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting

January 15-19, 2010

Boston, MA

HEB will be at booth #2553.

HEB Receives Rave Review from IHR

2009-09-18T09:18:00.014-04:00

"One of the best - if not the best - electronically accessible sites in the humanities" -Institute of Historical Research.

HEB has just received a rave review from the prestigious Reviews in History of the Institute of Historical Research, London.

Mark Herring of Winthrop University traces the history of Humanities E-Book, its place within the scholarly mission of ACLS, its broad-base coalition of university presses and learned societies, its emphasis on the quality of the collection, its user-friendly interface and search engine, innovative XML titles, very reasonable pricing and its close attention to details such as free MARC records, citation methods and other metadata. The review gives ACLS and HEB the highest praise for their work within the digital humanities:

"...ACLS has gone about its work to put together people and books to create the best possible site. Suffice it to say that numerous other groups and organizations work together to make HEB one of the best - if not the best - electronically accessible sites in the humanities. It surely stands as an equal to JSTOR, MUSE and other contenders to this throne."

MLA Joins HEB as Participating Society

2009-09-09T14:32:00.005-04:00

ACLS Humanities E-Book is pleased to announce that the Modern Language Association has become our twentieth partner in moving forward to investigate new types of scholarly online materials, distribution, and access models. According to MLA Executive Director Rosemary G. Feal, "The MLA looks forward to collaborating with ACLS Humanities E-Book in its efforts to make electronic publications more widely available to scholars. We are pleased that through this partnership MLA members will have access to HEB's growing collection of titles at a reasonable price."

Positive Review for Litchfield’s Florence Ducal Capital

2009-09-02T12:14:00.008-04:00

R. Burr Litchfield's e-book Florence Ducal Capital received high praise in a review published in Seventeeth-Century News (Vol. 67, Nos. 1&2; 2009-04-19), available soon via the reviews link on the title page. Reviewer Judith C. Brown writes: "The book would not yield nearly as many riches as it does if it were not an electronic book. Its ability to lead the reader digitially to the cartographic, visual, and other sources on which the book's scaffolding is built make this a new kind of book - a book which could not have been envisioned before the digital revolution and which uncovers an enormous amount of valuable information and insight as one digs into its maps, census databases, footnotes, and other electronically available information."

This title was HEB's first entirely born-digital work, for which HEB acted as the publisher. Linked to the Online Gazetteer of Sixteenth-Century Florence at Brown University, and using Brown's Online Catasto of 1427, this e-book traces the transition from republic to duchy and analyzes how new alignments of political, social and economic power had a profound impact on the physical contours of the city and hence on its artistic and cultural life, and how courtly patronage and artistic projects in turn had major influence on choices of habitation and commercial networks. This study crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries between social history and cultural studies, while basing itself firmly on the physical fabric of Florence and its archival representations.

Summer 2009 HEB News Published

2009-08-26T15:50:00.004-04:00

The new issue of the HEB News (Vol. 3, No. 3) is now available for download as a PDF and will also be emailed to subscribers. This issue contains several important announcements including HEB's plans for a new publisher alliance, the availability of individual subscriptions, and an upcoming experiment to test HEB titles on various handheld reading devices. It also announces the participation of five new socieities in HEB and lists HEB's new, published and forthcoming XML titles.

HEB Announces Individual Subscription Offer

2009-06-08T12:18:00.020-04:00

HEB is now please to make individual subscriptions available through standing membership in any of the 70 ACLS constituent societies.

The subscription offers unlimited access to 2,200 cross-searchable, full-text titles across the humanities and related social sciences. Titles have been selected and peer reviewed by ACLS constituent learned societies for their continued value in teaching and research, and approximately 500 titles are being added each year.

The collection includes both in-and out-of print titles ranging from the 1880s through the present. Titles link to publishers' websites and to online reviews in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other sites. Individual subscriptions are USD $35.00 for a twelve-month subscription.

Individual subscriptions are ideal for those whose schools might not yet have an institutional subscription to HEB or for individual members of a learned society who might not be affiliated with a subscribing institution.

For more information on individual subscription to Humanities E-Book, please visit the Individual Subscription page and review the Terms. To make a purchase online via our secure server, please visit Online Purchase.

An HEB Perspective on Google Books

2009-06-08T12:15:00.005-04:00

HEB Co-Director Ron Musto reflects on the Google Books project and its impact on historical scholarship in "Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past," in the June 12, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Review.

Please visit http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i39/39b00401.htm for full article.

AHA Highlights Spring 2009 HEB News

2009-05-01T12:10:00.004-04:00

From the American Historical Association's AHA Today, "What We're Reading: April 30, 2009 Edition":

As this month rounds up, we round up too, with links to recent rankings and winners, current events, and articles on a variety of topics.

Our colleagues at ACLS Humanities E-Book reflect on ten years (extending back to when they were History E-Book) and speculate that "[t]he print monograph and journal...are succumbing to the pressure of the economic crisis."

Please visit http://blog.historians.org/what-we-are-reading/781/what-were-reading-april-30-2009-edition for full article.

Spring 2009 HEB News Published

2009-04-24T12:07:00.005-04:00

The new issue of the HEB News (Vol. 3, No. 2) is now available for download as a PDF and will also be emailed to subscribers. This issue brings some reflections on HEB's tenth year and addresses the current situation in humanities publishing. It also lists HEB's Top Ten Books and our new XML titles.

HEB to Attend SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting

2009-04-15T12:04:00.004-04:00

ACLS Humanites E-Book will be exhibiting at the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET) Annual Membership Meeting from May 14-15, 2009 in Atlanta, GA. Please see http://www.lyrasis.org/Classes-and-Events/SOLINET-Annual-Membership-Meeting.aspx for more information.

New White Paper and XML Backlist Experiment

2009-04-01T12:01:00.005-04:00

HEB's new White Paper is now available. It details our findings in the XML Backlist Experiment, as well as what we've learned about comparative workflow, schedule, and costs. Please see the XML Backlist Experiment page for a summary of the survey results. The White Paper is available as a free PDF download on our site or as an attractively bound paperback for a $10 purchase on Amazon.

HEB Responds to Stan Katz on Digital Humanities

2009-03-26T11:59:00.005-04:00

http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/katz/the-fate-of-the-humanities-article#c015956

(Post by Ron Musto and Eileen Gardiner, ACLS Humanities E-Book, The Chronicle Review, March 26, 2009.)

Liza Daly Reviews HEB White Paper 2

2009-02-01T11:56:00.004-05:00

http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/21/a-case-study-in-converting-image-based-ebooks-into-xml/

(A review by Threepress Consulting, Digital Tools for 21st Century Publishing, February 2009)

“There’s a great deal of valuable information in this recently-released white paper by The American Council of Learned Societies…. Although the study was based on scholarly books, their findings would apply to many other digitization projects.”

American Historical Association Announces New HEB Titles

2009-01-21T11:53:00.005-05:00

http://blog.historians.org/news/702/acls-humanities-e-book-adds-new-titles
(AHA Today, American Historical Association, January 21, 2009)

“Notable among the recent additions is the AHA's Guide to Historical Literature series. The three editions in this series (published in 1931, 1961, and 1995) offer ‘a selective inventory of the best historical literature in all fields, topics, and methods.’ Over the years these volumes have provided snapshots of the best work in the discipline at any given time. Given the large volume of new work being produced annually, we hope to develop a fourth edition of the Guide in the not-to-distant future.”

Past Meeting Attendance

2009-01-01T11:50:00.004-05:00

In its efforts to strengthen outreach to the library and scholarly communities, ACLSHumanities E-Book continues to travel widely, attending conferences, participating in panel discussions, and giving lectures and demonstrations. To access an extensive list of past conferences and meetings, please visit Past Conferences Attended.

Archived Reviews and Notices

2009-01-01T11:47:00.005-05:00

To access the archive of HEB reviews and notices, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/hebnews_archive.html.