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.