New Titles and MARC Records Now Available

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) just added 323 titles to our online platform as part of our Fall 2016 title release, bringing our collection to 5,000 books.

Our latest round of books includes:

• Additional offerings from some of our longstanding publishing partners: 54 books from Harvard University Press, 40 from University of California Press, 26 from Cambridge University Press, 23 from Princeton University Press.
• Fifty-one titles from our new collaborating publisher Berghahn Books; as well as a selection of titles from other first-time contributors Temple University Press, University of Hawaii Press, Fortress Press, Orbis Books, Arden Press, Northwestern University Press, and Liverpool University Press.
• Twenty-nine titles authored by ACLS Fellows.
• Expanded offerings in areas of scholarship including Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, Environmental History, Architectural History, and Animal Studies.
• New additions to the ACLS Centennial series, which commemorates the founding of the organization in 1919, as well as the Fordham Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series.
• One hundred twenty-nine titles that have received awards from a number of ACLS constituent societies.

MARC Records 

MARC records for the new additions are available on our website for downloading and integration with library holdings. Librarians at HEB’s subscribing institutions may access these by following this link to download a zip file containing records corresponding to our newly released round 13 titles. New subscribers or those who have not recently updated their MARC records for the collection should instead download the cumulative file acls1-13.zip (covering all titles in rounds 1-13).

If downloading the new records only, please be sure to also remove the four MARC records corresponding to titles removed in this round from your library catalog. These can be found in a file called acls13_REMOVED.zip. A list of all titles removed from the collection to date can be found here.

For any additional questions regarding cataloging and MARC records, don’t hesitate to contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

Fall 2016 Platform Improvements

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to announce a number of recent functionality improvements to our online interface that we hope will create a better user experience.

Readers now have the option of exporting citations through the “Copy citation” tool, as well as instantly sharing these via a number of reference managers and social media outlets. It is now also possible to annotate any title in the collection by using the free hypothes.is tool, an open platform allowing for note-taking on top of online resources across the web that have enabled this feature. To make annotations and comments, it is necessary to first create an account or sign-in by clicking the right arrow button at the top of the hypothes.is sidebar.

Look for further functionality and design enhancements to be added to HEB in the future as we continue to upgrade our platform.

HEB Pricing for 2017

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) has just announced its new pricing for the upcoming calendar year. Pricing for 2017 reflects a moderate increase for all subscription tiers to address the significant collection growth over the past three years, from just under 4,000 titles to 5,000 titles with our upcoming fall release. You can find details on new prices, going into effect January 1, our website.

As many of our top-hit titles—you can see the most recent list here—include books frequently acquired in print by academic librarians for use by faculty and students, for most subscribers there are considerable financial advantages to subscribing to the HEB collection. Online access for the entire university community eliminates the need not only to add an adequate number of copies of in-demand titles to a library's holdings, but also consistently having to purchase replacement copies for print books that are lost or damaged.

As a result of our growing collection as well as HEB's efforts to optimize usage among its subscribers, we are happy to report a usage uptick of 20% between the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016. Collection usage is thus at an all-time high.

HEB is eager to ensure our subscribers are getting the most out of our resource. Whether you are an existing subscriber or thinking of subscribing, and would like to schedule a webinar to have our staff provide you with an overview of the collection, please contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org and we'd be happy to set this up.

HEB's Top Ten Titles for January 2016-June 2016

For the first half of 2016, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is once again at the top of the list of most frequently accessed books in the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) collection, as has been the case for the past several periods. Clifford Geertz's  The Interpretation of Cultures and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this time in second and third place respectively, have also tended to consistently appear near the top.

New to this list are three diverse books: Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, a volume detailing how empires predating the modern nation-state relied on differences among populations in order to wield power, and winner of the 2011 World History Association Bentley Book Prize; Silencing the Past by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Ralph Trouillot, an examination of how history is both written and selectively silenced by historians; and National Book Award Finalist Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross, which investigates an incident in which Jewish citizens in a German-occupied Polish village during World War II were murdered not by the occupiers, but by fellow Poles.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
4. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010)
5. Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003)
6. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
7. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
8. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995, 2015)
9. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press, 2001)
10. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia, 2002)

HEB’s Latest Participating Publisher

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) has been joined by an additional publishing partner who will be participating in its upcoming fall title release, Temple University Press. Temple is contributing eight titles to be added to our platform, which include books in dance and performance history, film and media studies, and religion.

Temple University Press was founded in 1969, and focuses on works in the humanities and social sciences, as well as regional titles about Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. It was an early publisher of books in urban studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, and continues to be a forerunner in emerging fields such as disability studies and animal rights.

HEB Social Media Efforts

If your institution is an ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) subscriber or if you are interested in and passionate about the humanities, HEB has your back!  Follow the latest HEB news on any one of our social media pages or sign up for HEB's newsletter, Oh the Humanities.



HEB has been revamping efforts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest to connect better to our users and the pulse of the scholarly community.  HEB's Facebook and LinkedIn pages are great for discussions about topical news in the humanities, libraries, and academic scholarship. HEB’s Twitter handle @ACLS_HEB keeps subscribers and users updated with everything going on at HEB...whether it is our upcoming fall release or catching Pokémon around the office. And librarians love our Pinterest boards to see titles in some of the most trending subject lists in the HEB collection, as well as what is going on at ACLS.

For reading delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our monthly newsletter by writing to subscriptions@hebook.org, and don't forget to subscribe to this blog to read in depth about the latest developments specific to HEB.  So what are you waiting for? Join the humanities conversation and follow HEB online! 

New Titles Forthcoming in 2016

ACLS Humanities E-Book's (HEB) upcoming fall 2016 title release will be comprised of 321 books covering a wide range of subject areas, and will include contributions from publishing partners old and new. 

Here are some highlights:

• 54 titles from Harvard University Press
• 51 titles from new collaborating publisher Berghahn Books
• 40 titles from Princeton University Press
• 26 titles from Cambridge University Press
• 29 titles authored by former ACLS Fellows
• Expansion of coverage in areas of scholarship including Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, Environmental History, Architectural History and Animal Studies
• New additions to the ACLS Centennial and Fordham Perspectives in Continental Philosophy special series
• 129 titles awarded by scholarly societies for outstanding scholarship in their fields

For additional information on these forthcoming books, please contact us at info@hebook.org.