Directors Announce HEB Portal at CNI

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!

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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