HEB at ALA Midwinter 2014

Come see HEB at the upcoming American Library Association Midwinter Meeting!

We will be at Booth 545 and happy to answer any questions and discuss the collection with current and prospective subscribers. If you'd like to schedule an appointment, drop us a line at info@hebook.org.

ALA Midwinter 2014 takes place in Philadelphia, January 24-28. Please visit the official website to register and for further details.

We hope to see you in Philly!

ACLS Fellows' Publications on HEB

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is proud to feature more than one hundred publications by ACLS Fellows as part of its online collection. These titles are identified by their unique logo and may be searched as a separate series.

A complete list of Fellows' Publications on HEB can be found on our website and on Pinterest.

ACLS supports scholars in the humanities by awarding over $15 million in fellowships annually. Recipients for these highly competitive awards are selected from thousands of applications each year. Fellowships allow these scholars to pursue research that improves our understanding of the world, its cultures and histories.

Read more about ACLS fellows and annual fellowship competitions on the ACLS website.

New on HEB: Miss Yourlovin and From Heads of Household to Heads of State

HEB has just published two more entries in its ongoing Gutenberg-e series. We are happy to offer these new titles, both of which represent recent scholarship in the fields of women's studies and women's history.

Miss Yourlovin: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II by Ann Elizabeth Pfau delves into gender roles and the perception of women among U.S. soldiers during the second world war. What emerges is a conflicted view divided between sentimentality and eroticism, a yearning for domesticity and a mistrust of female independence. The book’s name derives from a B-24 bomber operating in the Mediterranean theater during World War II and the pinup girl that served as its decoration and mascot.

In J. L. McIntosh’s From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession we turn to Tudor England, investigating Mary and Elizabeth Tudor’s reigns during a historical period ostensibly defined by patriarchal dominance. The author argues here that these two monarchs established themselves as authority figures able to wield sovereign power not only because they were the legal heirs to the throne (through the 1544 Act of Succession) but also because, in their preaccession political careers, they already functioned as heads of their own independent households.

These volumes are the XML-formatted counterparts of online editions originally published by Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association.

Latest HEB Top Ten Titles (Fall 2013)

Once again HEB is pleased to publish its latest list of the ten most frequently accessed titles in the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection, which now totals close to 4,000 books. These findings cover our most recently processed royalty period for the first half of 2013.

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. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
5. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
6. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
7. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
8. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
9. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985)
10. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)

Frankfurt Book Fair 2013

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be attending this year's Frankfurt Book Fair from October 9 to 11. If you will be in Frankfurt as well and are interested in setting up a meeting, please write us at info@hebook.org. We look forward to seeing you there.

HEB Pricing for 2014

ACLS Humanities E-Book is announcing its subscription rates for the upcoming year, effective January 2014. HEB did not increase prices in 2013 due to economic concerns and budgetary constraints among its subscriber base. For 2014, rates will increase approximately 3% over the 2012 rates, despite a 20% increase in the size of the collection over the past two years.

New rates will go into effect on January 1, 2014, and can be found on our website. Institutions that subscribe before this date will receive the 2012-2013 rates for the subscription period. Group discounts and consortia pricing will apply accordingly. For more information, please contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

New Titles and MARC Records Released

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to announce we have just added 327 new titles to our online collection. These titles are automatically available to all subscribers and MARC records may be downloaded for easy integration with library holdings (please see below for instructions).

This brings the grand total of titles in the HEB collection to 3,987. A comprehensive downloadable title list, including ISBN numbers and subject headings, can be found here: http://humanitiesebook.org/the-collection/default.html.

With this latest release, we are increasing HEB’s offerings in American and European History, Biblical Literature, Film and Media Studies and Legal History, among other areas.

Highlights of the release include:

• Dozens of titles recommended by HEB’s newest contributing societies, the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for Environmental History and the World History Association. Please visit our blog to read more about these collaborations.
• Twenty-seven volumes from the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization’s ongoing series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry (recommended for inclusion by the Association for Jewish Studies). More information about this new HEB series is available here.
• Twenty-six books published by the Medieval Academy of America.
• Forty-six prize-winning books that have received awards from ACLS’s constituent learned societies.

As always, all new additions represent titles of enduring value that have been carefully vetted and recommended by scholars.

MARC Records

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 322 records for our newly released titles or a cumulative zip file containing 3,784 records corresponding to all 3,987 titles now live in the collection. (Note that one record may cover multiple volumes of the same title.)

The files are available for download at: http://humanitiesebook.org/help/for-librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683.

New subscribers or those who have not recently updated their MARC records for the collection should download acls1-10.zip (3,784 records corresponding to the 3,987 in rounds 1-10, online as of August 2013).

In order to add MARCs only the latest round of titles, please download the file acls10.zip, which includes 322 records for the 327 books added in August 2013.

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 manually remove the corresponding MARC records from your library catalog. A list of all titles removed from the collection to date, including the 33 books removed in this round, can be found here: http://humanitiesebook.org/help/for-librarians.html#Anchor-Titles-11113.

Records for all HEB titles are also available from WorldCat.

New HEB Website Launches

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just launched a new collection interface that will offer better navigability, including improvements in accessibility for users with disabilities. The revised interface also features a more integrated design, with a consistent appearance and functionality across the entire HEB website. We hope that this will result in a better user experience for our readers.

We're especially pleased to report that most features of the collection now allow for navigation by standard automatic readers and a variety of assistive technologies. The new HEB interface conforms to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Conformance Level A, which means that the collection meets all Level A Success Criteria and contains no absolute barriers to access. We will continue to periodically review and make improvements to our web interface in an effort to ensure that all users are able to make the most of our resource.

Extended Subscription Now Allows for Perpetual Access to HEB Collection

We are pleased to announce that HEB has modified the terms for its extended subscription license to include the option of easily and affordably obtaining a license in perpetuity. This will allow those subscribers who prefer to own titles to provide their institution's faculty and student body with permanent access to the collection. Pricing and other details regarding our new perpetual license option can be found on our website.

Please contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org and we will be happy to answer questions or provide additional information. 

New on HEB: Architecture and Memory

HEB has just released another installment in its Gutenberg-e series, the XML-formatted edition of a volume originally published by Columbia University Press in collaboration with the American Historical Association.

Robert Kirkbride's Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro presents an investigation of the studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro, and addresses the role of architecture in Western tradition as a bridge between the mathematical arts and the art of rhetoric as it relates to memory and eloquence.

New on HEB: "Trivial Complaints"

A new entry in in HEB's Gutenberg-e series is now available, “Trivial Complaints”: The Role of Privacy in Domestic Violence Law and Activism in the U.S., by Kirsten S. Rambo. This XML-formatted title was originally published as part of the  Gutenberg-e program, a digital publishing initiative of Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association that showcased the work of award-winning emerging scholars.

Here Rambo explores the relationship between privacy and domestic violence through an analysis of domestic violence litigation in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present day, taking into account how legal and cultural concepts of privacy have historically influenced the ways in which this society has understood domestic violence. The author has provided access to some of the primary source materials she drew on in her research, including links to transcripts of cases available online, as well audio excerpts of interviews she conducted with some of those directly involved.

Collection Usage Increases Significantly from 2007 to 2012

HEB recently put together an overview of usage of our resource in conjunction with collection growth and subscriber count over the last few years. The resulting chart tracks annual totals for page hits, title count, and institutional subscribers to HEB for 2007 through 2012.

The chart shows that the number of total annual hits has increased significantly more steeply than both the number of subscribers and titles, which seems to indicate that interest and usage among existing subscribers have continued to grow over time, and that our subscribers may be getting more out of the resource the longer they have access. HEB will release an additional 330 titles this summer, which we hope will add to the overall usefulness of the collection.

Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

ACLS Humanities E-Book is pleased to announce that the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization is now a contributing publisher to our collection. Established in 1965, the Littman Library is a respected leader in Jewish Studies titles.

Our forthcoming release of new titles in early summer 2013 will include the first 27 volumes of the Littman Library's ongoing series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, launched in 1986 by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and presenting interdisciplinary takes on all aspects of the history of the Jews in Poland. 

New on HEB: The English Institute's Taking Liberties with the Author

HEB is pleased to announce the release of our latest XML title, Taking Liberties with the Author, edited by Meredith L. McGill and published by the English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This work is the third born-digital installment in the English Institute's series of publications derived from its annual conferences; it comprises selected papers from the 2010 conference, "Author," held at Harvard University. This volume features five essays, in addition to the editor's introduction, exploring the place of the author in literary discourse. In essays that range from an analysis of authorial disavowal in ancient and medieval rhetorical traditions to an account of corporate authorship as articulated in the Disney-Pixar merger , this volume explores the persistence of the figure of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism.

HEB White Paper 4 Released

HEB recently published its fourth official white paper, Perception Analysis of Scholarly E-Books in the Humanities at the Collegiate Level by Lee Walton and Edward Reiner, which is now available on our website here and as a downloadable PDF. This report examines perceptions and preferences among academic librarians regarding e-book offerings in the humanities, and provides an overview of currently available digital scholarly resources.

HEB thus continues to make available its findings from studies and surveys conducted to investigate the evolution of digital scholarship since the launch of the collection in 2002. Our previously released reports detailing the results of these efforts can all be found on our website: http://humanitiesebook.org/help/white-papers.html.

HEB at ACRL 2013 in Indianapolis

HEB will be an exhibitor at the Association of College & Research Libraries meeting taking place from April 10-13, 2013, in Indianapolis. Visit the conference website for details and registration info.

Stop by to see us at Booth 129! We look forward to discussing our upcoming release of 300+ new titles and our new and improved collection interface, to be launched in the coming weeks. We'll also have our most recent white paper on hand and free giveaways.

You can also contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org to set up an appointment ahead of time. 

New Participating Societies Partner with HEB

ACLS Humanities E-Book is pleased to announce that the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the World History Association (WHA) have partnered with HEB as contributing societies. HEB actively works to expand the areas of scholarship included in our collection to reflect current trends and interests in scholarly research, and now collaborates with twenty-seven of ACLS’s constituent learned societies on these efforts. (See a list of all participating societies here.) As new contributors, AAR and WHA have recently developed lists of recommended titles of enduring value in their fields.

The AAR list was compiled by the heads of the AAR’s sixty-four program units, which include the following: Animals and Religion; Buddhist Critical–Constructive Reflection; Chinese Religions; Indigenous Religious Traditions; Law, Religion, and Culture; Mysticism; Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought; Queer Theory and LGBT Studies in Religion; and Religion in Europe. These recommendations increase and diversify our offerings of high-quality titles in religion and theology.

HEB received a comprehensive bibliography of significant works in world history from The World History Association, admitted to ACLS in 2011. These titles reflect the WHA’s goal of fostering historical analysis undertaken from the point of view of the human community as opposed to that of specific nation-states, discrete regions or particular cultures. This list greatly expands our offerings in transregional, transnational and transcultural studies.

In addition, HEB was recently provided with new title suggestions from existing contributors, such as the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Historians Task Force.

Over the past few months HEB has been securing rights to and acquiring books based on these recommendations, which will form part of our upcoming release of several hundred titles scheduled to go live in late spring or early summer 2013. We look forward to making these scholarly-selected titles in the emerging and traditional fields of environmental history, LGBTQ studies, religion and world history available to our subscribers.

Latest HEB Top-Hit Titles (Spring 2013)

The latest list of the ten most frequently hit titles in the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection (totaling 3,700 books) is posted below. These findings are from our most recently processed royalty period, covering July 2012–December 2012.

In addition to the titles making repeat appearances on this list, there are two new entries for this cycle: Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, investigating the politics and social mores of the domestic slave trade through the example of the New Orleans slave market; and Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, which details the origins of this life-changing technology in business and government in the form of huge appliances through the development of our familiar home PCs. Frequent use of specific titles in the collection generally indicates recent course adoption or simply growing interest from scholars in the fields in question.

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. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
4. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
5. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)
6. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
7. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early American (Harvard University Press, 2003)
8. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
9. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
10. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Perseus Books, 1996)

New Handheld Titles Just Released

HEB has just released another round of downloadable titles, including Paul Boyer and Tom Engelhardt's By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

This brings the number of handheld titles now available from HEB to around 90, with dozens more slated for conversion in the coming months. Fields covered include Women's Studies, Religious Studies, Native Peoples of the Americas,  Asian History, African History, Latin American History and more; publication dates span the 1920s through 2000s.

All titles in HEB's handheld/mobile editions program may be individually purchased for $9.99 from various retailers, including Amazon, BooksOnBoard, eBookMall, Lybrary.com, Powell's Books, Feedbooks, and others.

For details on the program, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html.

HEB at NYSAIS Education and Information Technology Conference

HEB will be a first-time exhibitor at the NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) Education and Information Technology Conference (NEIT 13) this year. The conference takes place January 30-February 1, 2013, at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY. Details on the event can be found here.

We are happy to be able to offer annual subscriptions to secondary schools at the competitive rate reserved for institutions categorized as "very small" according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning.

KC Trommer, HEB subscriptions and marketing coordinator, will be available at NEIT 13 during exhibit hours on Thursday, 1/31, from 6PM to 9PM, as well as in attendance at the conference the following day, Friday, 2/1. Please write to subscriptions@hebook.org to set up an appointment or for details on how to subscribe.