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.