New on HEB: Oplontis Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy

ACLS Humanites E-Book (HEB) is pleased to announce its recent release of Oplontis Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy, Volume 1: The Ancient Setting and Modern Rediscovery, edited by John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser. This is the first of four volumes devoted to the archaeological discoveries made at the Villa A site at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata, Italy). The Oplontis Project is an initiative operating under the direction of Clarke and Michael L. Thomas of the University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici per Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia, as well as an international team of scholars working in multiple disciplines.

This first volume includes essays by Elaine K. Gazda; Lorenzo Fergola; Vincenzo Marasco; Giovanni Di Maio; Massimo Ricciard; Kathryn Gleason; Gaetano Di Pasquale, Daniela Moser, Emilia Allevato and Oliver Nelle; Elda Russo Ermolli and Erwan Messager; and Clarke; topics covered range from architecture to geology to ancient flora and fauna of the region, as well as an overview of on-site discoveries in chronological order from the end of the sixteenth century through the present.

The extensive research that gave rise to this publication also includes a navigable, three-dimensional virtual model of Villa A at Oplontis assembled by the Project team at the University of Texas and the King’s Visualisation Lab, King’s College, London, which will be available online in the near future. HEB will eventually incorporate this model into the publication.

HEB Partners with ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies)

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) recently joined the list of learned societies who provide title recommendations to help build the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) collection. 

Established in 1948, ASEEES is the leading international organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and Eastern Europe in regional and global context. ASEEES supports teaching, research and publication and has cultivated the field’s intellectual landscape for over fifty years through its chief publication, Slavic Review; its annual convention; its book prizes and its organizational newsletter.

HEB currently works directly with thirty-one of the American Council of Learned Societies's constituent member organizations to grow its title list. (See a list of all participating societies here.) We greatly value these collaborations that help ensure our offerings include works of enduring value in their fields, as well as reflecting new trends and interests in scholarly research.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2015

HEB will again be an exhibitor at the upcoming American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, this time taking place in Chicago, January 30-February 3, 2015.

We're excited to meet with our subscribers and prospective subscribers to let everyone know what's new and what to expect in 2015. Write to us at info@hebook.org to schedule an appointment, or simply stop by Booth 4923. We look forward to your visit!

To register for ALA Midwinter, please visit the official website.

HEB Top-Selling Handheld Editions

HEB is pleased to be able to offer a subset of titles from our online collection in a downloadable/ mobile format. We've recently analyzed our sales data for the latest royalty period, covering the first half of 2014, and present the results below.

Far outpacing all other titles is James McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, selling more than 500 copies for the period in question. (McPherson's Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is also available as an HEB handheld edition.)

Here are our current top ten handheld bestsellers:

1. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1989)
2. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985)
3. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (1995)
4. Ann P. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995)
5. Walter A. McDougall,  The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1995)
6. Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (1945)
7. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1991)
8. Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988)
9. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953)
10. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977)

The books are available from a number of online retailers. More information about our handheld program can be found here: http://humanitiesebook.org/the-collection/handheld-editions.html.

Fall Meetings: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, History of Science Society

This fall, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be an exhibitor at two society meetings.

We will be at the 2014 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) Annual Meeting, taking place October 31-November 1 at the JW Marriott Indianapolis in Indianapolis, IN. The meeting will be held jointly with the Religious Research Association and the Mormon Social Science Association. Details and registration information can be found on the SSSR website: http://www.sssrweb.org.

We will also be exhibiting at the 2014 History of Science Society (HSS) meeting, taking place on November 6-9, 2014, at the Westin Michigan Avenue Hotel in Chicago, IL. (HSS is a constituent society of ACLS.) The meeting will be held jointly with the Philosophy of Science Association. More details about the meeting can be found here: hssonline.org/meetings/2014-hss-annual-meeting.

Subscribers planning to attend either event and those interested in learning more about our resource are encouraged to reach out to Lee Walton, who will be representing HEB, at lwalton@hebook.org.

HEB's Top Ten Titles for January 2014-June 2014

HEB is pleased to once again publish our list of top-hit titles, which this time covers the first half of 2014. These represent the titles most frequently accessed by our subscribers during this period, often reflecting course adoptions.

While a number of titles noted below have appeared on this list consistently over the years (e.g., Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide), we are also seeing several new entries. These include: John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality; and Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.

This implies a continued interest in the subjects of nationalism, colonialism, race and racism, and religion, to name a few—a trend that HEB has been observing over the course of the last few semesters.

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. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
4. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
5. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early American (Harvard University Press, 2003)
6. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
7. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
8. Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
9. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
10. Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1974)

HEB and Accessibility

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) was recently a participant in a study of e-book accessibility, conducted by JISC and the Publishers Accessibility Action Group. HEB was designated one of seven "honest dealers" who responded to this inquiry (among a total of thirteen e-book platforms and aggregators contacted by the project), consequently designated "players to continue to invest with".

As per the JISC TechDis blog entry: "We commend the following for their active honest engagement. Thankyou to our 7 honest dealers; ACLS Humanities E-Book; Gale/Cengage; EBL (ebrary); EBSCO; Elsevier; Emerald Insight and Ingram. Cambridge University Press were in the middle of a redesign with enhanced accessibility so felt that results from existing platform would be unrepresentative. (...) If there’s a platform you expected to see here but they are not represented then feel free to ask them for a personal response regarding their accessibility credentials." Read the entire blog entry here.

At this time, we believe that most features of the HEB collection provide accessibility for users with disabilities who draw on assistive technologies, and allow for navigation by standard automatic screen readers. Specifically, the HEB collection currently conforms to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Conformance Level A; which means that titles meet all Level A Success Criteria and contain no absolute barriers to access; all page-image titles contain an OCR scanned, text-only version of the content that can be processed by assistive technologies; links are operable by keyboard, and images include descriptive "ALT" attributes.

We continue to strive to improve our accessibility and welcome input from readers to this effect.

HEB Pricing for 2015

ACLS Humanities E-Book has now finalized its subscription rates for the upcoming year. These rates go into effect January 2015, and can be found on our website. Depending on a subscriber's size and classification, prices will go up by a margin of roughly 2.8% to 3.4%. This modest increase will serve to offset administrative overhead; subscribers are asked to bear in mind that it is accompanied by an increase in the size of our collection of about 9%, as we've just added another 353 titles, bringing the total to over 4,300.

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 that we have just added 353 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 4,315. A comprehensive downloadable title list, including ISBN numbers and subject headings, can be found here: http://humanitiesebook.org/the-collection/default.html.

Highlights of the release include:

• New titles in the areas of U.S. History, Medieval History, Religion, and Music and Musicology, among others.
• Titles recommended by HEB's newest participating learned societies, the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the National Communications Association (NCA), and the Society for Military History (SMH).
• An additional 112 titles published by Oxford University Press, one of the original publishers to partner with HEB when the collection first launched in 2002.
• Forty-nine titles added from Harvard University Press, another among HEB's original collaborating publishers.
• Contributions from HEB's most recently signed collaborating publishers, University of Toronto Press, Southern Illinois University Press, Michigan State University Press and Baylor University Press.

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 352 records for our newly released titles or a cumulative zip file containing 4,103 records corresponding to all 4,315 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 acls1-11.zip (covering all titles in rounds 1-11, online as of August 2014).

In order to add MARCs for only the most recent releases, please download the file acls11.zip, which includes records for the 353 books added in August 2014, as well as for 8 XML-encoded frontlist titles released intermittently since round 10.

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.

HEB Joins the Ex Libris Alma Community Zone Program

As of July 2014, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is a participant in the Ex Libris Alma Community Zone program. HEB will provide MARC records and metadata to Ex Libris, enabling participating libraries to streamline their acquisition and cataloging processes. Under the Alma Community Zone program, Ex Libris load publishers’ MARC records into the central community catalog, instead of each library loading the records into its local catalog. As a result, librarians are spared time-consuming processes associated with acquisition, the updating of records and authority control.

Sharona Sagi, director of resource management strategy at Ex Libris, commented: “The selection, acquisition, and management of e-books can be complex, expensive, and time-consuming, often causing delays in their availability to end users. We are delighted that ... HEB have added their metadata to the community catalog, thus freeing their customers from uploading and updating e-book metadata. In addition to benefiting [the] customer community and increasing the discoverability of their collections, their involvement in the program supports their primary goal of making knowledge more easily available to researchers.”

About Ex Libris: Ex Libris is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national and research libraries. For more information about Ex Libris Group, see its website. 

HEB at ATLA 2014

HEB will again be an exhibitor at this year's ATLA (American Theological Library Association) annual conference in New Orleans, LA, June 19-20.

If you are attending, stop by and see us at Booth 46! You can also schedule an appointment with HEB National Academic Library Account Manager Lee Walton.

HEB consultant and customer relations specialist Ed Reiner will be giving a presentation on "Digital Resources in Academia" on Friday, June 20, 8AM. This session will describe, compare, and analyze various digital resources, collections, and materials for use in academic settings and highlight the various digital programs available to librarians, faculty and students in the social sciences, humanities and related areas.

For more information on the event, please visit the conference website.

HEB at SUNYLA 2014

Librarians, please come by and visit HEB at the upcoming SUNYLA 2014 conference in Albany, NY.

We will be at Table F13 on Tuesday, June 10, and Wednesday, June 11, and will be happy to answer any questions and discuss the HEB collection with current and prospective subscribers. Libraries who subscribe to HEB during the conference will be entitled to a special show discount of 20%. (For current pricing, please see our website.) If you'd like to schedule an appointment, drop us a line at subscriptions@hebook.org.

The event takes place on the University at Albany campus, June 9-13. Please visit the conference website to register and for further details.

We hope to see you in Albany!

New on HEB: Three Gutenberg-e Titles

HEB has just released three additional titles in its ongoing Gutenberg-e series. These latest installments complete the HEB edition of this pathbreaking collaboration between Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association intended to make innovative scholarship available to readers in a digital format. Support for the Gutenberg-e initiative was provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Newly available on HEB, Societies, Religion, and History: Central East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE by Rhonda Gonzales delves into the history of the Ruvu peoples living along the central Tanzania coast. The work explores the archaeological and linguistic significance of this particular region, which was central to brokering economic and other interactions between various societal and geographic groups over a period of hundreds of years. 

Laura J. Mitchell's Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa  addresses colonial/imperial expansion and conflict between representatives of the Dutch East India Company and indigenous peoples, as well as Indian-Ocean slaves, in South Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—bringing to light the habits and practices of European settlers outside of organized political and military efforts that proved instrumental to exerting colonial control over local frontier regions.

Finally, Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity by Margaret Poulos investigates the symbolism of depictions of women-in-arms and well as actual historic female participation in three armed conflicts: the War of Independence or Greek Revolution of 1821, the National Resistance movement (1941–44) and the Greek Civil War (1946–49), in a dissertation that addresses the intersections between nationalism, militarism and feminism.

HEB is pleased to offer its own editions of all 35 prize-winning books in the series in a cross-searchable, XML format. For a complete list of titles, please see this link.

HEB's Top Users for 2013

Below is our list of the twenty-five institutional subscribers to ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) with the highest usage for 2013. Among these are some of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the US, the United Kingdom and Canada.

1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2. University of Toronto, Toronto, CA
3. York University, Toronto, CA
4. Harvard University
5. American Public University System
6. Columbia University
7. The University of Chicago
8. Durham University, Durham, UK
9. Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
10. New York University
11. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
12. Yale University
13. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
14. University of Wisconsin, Madison
15. McGill University
16. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
17. Stanford University
18. University of Sydney
19. London School of Economics, UK
20. University of California, San Diego
21. University of California, Berkeley
22. University of Liverpool, UK
23. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
24. Princeton University
25. University of Virginia

Usage statistics reflect both page views and searches.

For a complete list of current subscribers, please see this page.

New Participating Publishers for 2014

HEB is pleased to announce that we have recently partnered with four new university presses in our efforts to bring scholarship of enduring value to our subscribers. Our most recently signed collaborating publishers, who will be contributing to our upcoming title release in summer 2014, are Southern Illinois University Press, Baylor University Press, Michigan State University Press and University of Toronto Press.

The number of publishers who have elected to work with HEB now stands at 112, including both university and some commercial presses. All content has been vetted by scholars and/or consists of books that have won prizes in their fields. 

Please see our growing list of contributing publishers here.

HEB's Top Ten Titles for July 2013-December 2013

As we do every six months, HEB is pleased to publish another top-hit titles list, covering the second half of 2013. The most frequently accessed titles in our collection of 4,000 books typically reflect course adoptions, and tend to feature a number of recurring books every cycle (such as, once again, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest).

For the fall 2013 semester, we are seeing a rising interest in sociology, cultural studies, nationalism and post colonialism, women's and gender studies, religion, and technology. There are three new entries making their first appearance among the top-hit titles for this period: Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, David E. Nye's Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, and Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn.

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. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
4. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
5. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
6. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
7. Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Perseus Books, 2002)
8. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (MIT Press, 2006)
9. Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
10. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)

Forthcoming in 2014: New Titles from Harvard University Press

ACLS Humanities E-Book's (HEB) forthcoming title release in early summer 2014 will include 49 titles from Harvard University Press, published between 1948 and 2010 and covering diverse areas such as European History, U.S. History, Asian History, Science & Technology, Women’s Studies, and Literature. Many of these books are prizewinners in their fields. Others were recommended by ACLS’s constituent learned societies, such as the American Academy of Religion, the World History Association, the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Historians Task Force.



Harvard University Press was among the original set of publishers to partner with HEB when the collection launched in 2002 (as the ACLS History E-Book Project). Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press continues to be a leading publisher of convergent works in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, while also taking bold steps toward innovative partnerships and an expanded commitment to facilitating scholarly conversation around the globe.

HEB is pleased to be able to feature these new titles and continue our collaboration with Harvard University Press.

Forthcoming in 2014: New Titles from Oxford University Press

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to report that our forthcoming title release in early summer 2014 will include 112 titles published by Oxford University Press, covering areas from U.S. History to Women’s Studies to Music & Musicology. These titles are either prizewinners in their fields and/or have been recommended for inclusion in our collection by ACLS’s constituent learned societies, such as the American Academy of Religion, the World History Association and the American Society for Legal History, as especially valuable for course work, research and reference.

OUP was one of the original publishers to partner with HEB when the collection first launched (as the ACLS History E-Book Project) in 2002. As a department of the University of Oxford, OUP furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide. OUP is the world’s largest university press with the widest global presence.

We are happy to be able to add to our offerings from this esteemed university press and look forward to continuing our collaboration with OUP in the future.

New on HEB: Three Gutenberg-e Titles

HEB is pleased  to release three new titles in its ongoing Gutenberg-e series.

In Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi draws on a range of archival, narrative, and oral historical sources in this treatment of the economy and society of nineteenth-century Afghanistan, paying special attention to the ramifications of British Indian colonialism.

Erika Lauren Lindgren’s Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany presents the material underpinnings of spirituality in female Dominican monasteries, as well as the sensual aspects of religious practice, taking into account the women's own documentation of their experiences of the monastic environment in so-called Sister-Books.

Bin Yang’s Between Winds and Clouds: the Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE-Twentieth Century CE) addresses the transformation of an ethnically and culturally distinct region in Southeast Asia into a Chinese province over a period of 2000 years, and frames this process in a broad historical context that includes both local and international players.

All three books were selected by the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press as part of their Gutenberg-e initiative, awarding scholarship that incorporates innovative use of digital technology.

HEB at NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) NEIT Conference

HEB will attend this year's NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) Education and Information Technology Conference (NEIT 14). The conference takes place January 29-31, 2014, at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY.

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, would be happy to meet with attendees during exhibit hours on Thursday, 1/30, from 6PM to 9PM, or on the morning of Friday, 1/31. Please write to subscriptions@hebook.org to set up an appointment.

Visit the NYSAIS website here for details on this event.

New Handheld Titles Available from HEB

HEB continues to expand its offering of titles formatted for use with handheld devices. The latest batch of 28 downloadable titles includes such diverse books as Dan Carter's The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics; Francois Hartog's The Mirror of Herodotus; Walter McDougall's The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age; Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity by Sarah Pomeroy; James Scott's Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; and The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 by Lawrence Stone.

There are currently around 120 handheld titles available for purchase from various retailers, including Barnes & Noble's NOOK Book Store, Amazon, BooksOnBoard, eBookMall, Lybrary.com, Powell's Books, Feedbooks, and others.

For more information on this program, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html.