Collection Development Survey Results

HEB recently asked its subscribers to take part in a survey designed to assist us in expanding our title list to reflect current interests in scholarship and adding to any underrepresented areas. In response we received feedback from 185 participants at subscribing institutions.

Those areas generating the most interest included several that are already prominently featured or traditionally strong in the HEB collection, such as European History and U.S. History. The top five fields of interest to participating subscribers were Film and Media Studies, American History, Latin American History, Art and Architecture and Literature—though each of the remaining thirty-one options was also selected a number of times. These results seem to indicate that, for one, maintaining the current breadth and diversity of our humanities offerings is essential; and furthermore, that certain core fields have remained popular over the span of HEB’s ten-year existence and our subscribers would like to see these continue to grow.

We had also asked survey participants to suggest new areas to explore and specific titles they would like us to consider adding. These too covered a wide variety of fields, including mythology/esoterica, non-western religion, gender studies, ecology, cultural studies, psychology, and other categories that, while not strictly falling under the mantle of a humanities-oriented initiative, may include some cross-over.

These findings will be used by HEB to continue to develop our collection over the coming years. We thank everyone who took part in the survey.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2013

HEB will once again be attending the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, taking place in Seattle from January 25 to 29.

To set up an appointment, contact us at info@hebook.org. Or simply stop by our booth!

We will be available at Booth 1210 to discuss what’s new at HEB, including plans for expanding our title list, our newly redesigned website to be launched in early 2013, and the latest additions to our growing list of downloadable/handheld books, as well as to answer any questions from current and future subscribers. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please visit the 2013 ALA Midwinter website to register and for further details on attending the meeting.

HEB Top-Hit Titles, Fall 2012

Listed below are the top ten most frequently hit titles in the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection of 3,700 books, as of our latest royalty period (covering the first half of 2012).

Most of these books have been in frequent use over the past few years, and evidently continue to be much in demand. Making repeat appearances on this list are Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso); 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); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books); John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press); and Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press).

New entries, both from esteemed university presses, address the subjects of immigration law and African American women's history. They are Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press) and Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press).

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
3. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
4. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
5. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
6. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
7. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
8. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
9. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
10. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997)

Revised HEB Title List and MARC Record Set Now Available

ACLS Humanities E-Book has recently updated its collection, resulting in a slight change to our title list and MARC record set. (Please note that, while HEB generally updates its collection on an annual basis as new rounds of titles are released, individual new frontlist titles may be added or—rarely—existing titles may be taken down in between these release cycles.)

The collection now stands at 3,690. An up-to-date title list, including ISBN numbers and subject headings, can be found here: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

MARC records for the collection have also been revised and the latest set is available for download. New subscribers or those who have not recently updated their catalogs should download the latest cumulative file, acls1-9.1.zip. If you have previously updated your records in tandem with the July 2012 release, the current set is identical except for the following: The control number in field 001 was streamlined for a subset of records, records for 18 titles have been removed (the existing link in your catalog will now lead to an inactive title record page; please see this link for a list of all titles removed from the collection since its launch, with date of removal), and this batch includes one new frontlist title released in September.

The latest records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available at: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683.

Please don't hesitate to contact us with any additional questions by writing to info@hebook.org.

New on HEB: Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices

HEB has just added a new XML title to its collection:  Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna by Maria Rentetzi. In her examination of women working as independent radioactivity researchers at Viennese institutions in the early decades of the last century, Rentetzi draws on documentary research, material culture and built environment analysis, and oral histories. Her text is accompanied by historical photographs and statistical overviews of female participation in radium-related research and scholarship from the 1910s through the 1930s.

This represents the HEB edition of a prizewinning monograph originally published as part of the Gutenberg-e program, a co-initiative of the American Historical Association in conjunction with Columbia University Press.

HEB Records Now Available on WorldCat

ACLS Humanities E-Book has teamed up with OCLC to make available a complete set of records for the HEB collection via WorldCat. Records for all HEB titles have now been assigned unique OCLC ID numbers. We hope this will make it easier for subscribers who draw on this service to integrate HEB with the rest of their digital holdings.

HEB titles are also available as a WorldCat Collection Set. Please see details here.

New Titles and MARC Records Available from ACLS Humanities E-Book

ACLS Humanities E-Book is pleased to announce that we have just added 404 new titles to the collection, and MARC records for these books are now available for download (please see instructions for this below).

With this latest release, we are expanding the areas of philosophy and film and media studies by forty-seven and twenty-nine titles, respectively; as well as adding titles in legal history, linguistics and literature, and several other categories. This round includes eighty-three award-winning titles. HEB is also adding two new special series, Medieval European Studies and West Virginia and Appalachia, both from West Virginia University Press, and is releasing the final three installments of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, completing this nine-volume series. (For a list of all HEB special series, please see: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html#anchor488085.)

This brings the grand total of titles in the collection to 3,707. A downloadable title list, including ISBN numbers and subject headings, can be found here: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

MARC records and cataloging data for all titles in the collection are available for download on our website. Subscribers may download either a zip file containing 393 records for our new titles (as well as one corrected record for a previously released title), or a cumulative zip file containing 3,511 records and covering all 3,707 titles now live in the collection. (The discrepancy in number of MARCs versus titles is due to the fact that one record may cover multiple volumes of the same title.) If downloading the new records only, please bear in mind that a number of titles are being removed in this round and that you may wish to remove manually the corresponding MARC records from your library catalog. A list of all titles removed from the collection to date, including the 28 books removed in this round, can be found here: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-Titles-11113.

In addition to downloading the records directly from the HEB website, subscribers will also be able to obtain our records from WorldCat in the near future, complete with OCLC IDs. We anticipate that this will make managing data for all digital library holdings much simpler for those subscribers that draw on WorldCat. We are in the process of working with OCLC to import the cumulative records; this process should be completed in the next few weeks.

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

New subscribers or those who may not have recently updated their MARC records should download acls1-9.zip (3,511 records for all 3,707 books in rounds 1-9, online as of July 2012).

In order to add only the latest round of titles, please download the file acls9.zip, which includes 392 records for the 404 books added in July 2012, plus one corrected record.

Thank you for subscribing to ACLS Humanities E-Book; we hope you enjoy these new offerings!

New HEB Handheld Editions

HEB has officially launched its handheld/mobile editions program, with several dozen titles from the online collection now available for use with various handheld readers, and more to come down the line. For the time being, these titles may be individually purchased for $9.99 from various online retailers, including Amazon and iBooks. We are also exploring options for eventually offering the books as part of a subscriptions package.

This initial set of handheld titles includes older as well as contemporary works, from fields such as European, African, and Asian History; Women's Studies; Art; Science and Technology; and more.

Among HEB's current handheld offerings are George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England; de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494; Hubert Jedin's History of the Council of Trent, Volumes I and II; Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate; Claire Robertson and Martin Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa; Stephen Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe; Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management; Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; and E. Fuller Torrey: Schizophrenia and Civilization.

For details on all titles currently available, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html.

Usage Stats for HEB

As a reminder, usage statistics for the HEB collection are available to subscribing institutions wishing to monitor the extent to which this resource is used by students and faculty, as well as the popularity of individual titles. To obtain stats, go to the following link:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/s/stats/subscriber
and select "ACLS Humanities E-Book (acls)" in the list of collections displayed at left.

To obtain an overview of hits for the collection as a whole, including searches, under "Choose report type," select the "Custom" report option and specify the desired date range. The report will be issued immediately and displayed in your browser. Note that you must be within the institution's allowed IP ranges to issue these requests, which are tracked via automatic IP recognition (no log-in is required).

For a detailed, COUNTER-compliant report showing individual titles, select "Book Report 2" under "Choose report type," select the desired year, and enter the recipient's e-mail address. (Do not select "Book Report 1," as this provides data only for those digital texts that the user can view in their entirety all at once. This does not apply to any of the books in the HEB collection, which can be viewed exclusively on a page-by-page or section-by-section basis.) The requested report will be issued via e-mail and may take a few hours to arrive in your mailbox.

Note that proxy access through third-party providers such as Shibboleth and EZProxy is tracked separately, and those usage stats should be added to the reports described above. Access via password log-in will also not be reflected in HEB usage stat reports.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2012

ACLS Humanities E-Book recently reported and paid its latest round of royalties to our participating publishers and authors. Please find the top ten most frequently hit titles in our collection of over 3,300 titles for this latest royalty period listed below.

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remains in first place. Also making repeat appearances on this list are Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books), Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press), Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press), Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press), Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge).

Titles in Latin American studies, gender studies, and U.S. history are new in this round. They are Inga Clendinnen's Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge University Press, 2003; first published in 1987), Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1999; first published in 1989) and Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004). New titles making a jump into the top ten hit books can indicate course adoption for a semester and/or general shifting interests in academia and the scholarly community.

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. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
4. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990)
5. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
6. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
7. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
8. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
9. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1999)
10. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)

ALA Midwinter 2012 Recap

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

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.