ACLS Humanities E-Book Joins Joint Mellon Foundation/NEH Humanities Open Book Initiative

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is proud to announce its participation in Humanities Open Book (HOB), a program intended to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into free e-books. HEB is one of ten awardees to have been selected for participation in this joint initiative of The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funders of humanities research in the United States.

To create a title list for this pilot program,  HEB will work with a specially convened committee to select fifteen books whose authors have retained or recovered publishing rights. The books will be selected for their enduring scholarly value and potential public interest. HEB has a unique opportunity to pursue and represent authors who are not affiliated with a publishing body acting on their behalf, but instead will be able to license work directly to it.

For further details about the program, please see the NEH press release.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2016

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be an exhibitor at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston, January 8-12, 2016. Stop by Booth 908 and say hello!

We look forward to touching base with current and prospective subscribers and answering questions about the collection. If you don't yet subscribe, sign up for a free trial. There will also be free giveaways and cocktails.

This year, HEB is hosting a roundtable discussion with the topic "E-Books in the Academic Library: Perceptions versus Reality" on Sunday, January 10, 8:30 AM-10 AM, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC), Room 204AB. If you are a librarian and would like to join the conversation, write to us at subscriptions@hebook.org. We welcome your participation!

To register for the conference, visit the official website.

ACLS Humanities E-Book on Google+

You can now find HEB on Google Plus! Connect with us there for updates on the latest title releases and other news items of interest.

HEB's Top Ten Titles for January 2015-June 2015

HEB tracks and releases a list of our most-accessed titles on a semi-annual basis. Over the years this has proved a useful tool for monitoring trends in scholarly research and teaching across disciplines, with certain books becoming permanent fixtures of the HEB "bestseller" list, but one or two newcomers occasionally pointing to rising interest in other fields of study.

For the first half of 2015, that newcomer was Steven Hahn's Pulitzer-Prize winning A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003), adding to the growing number of titles dealing with race and racism in America among our top-accessed books. (As featured on this blog in the past, for those who are actively researching these areas, HEB's Pinterest board Race in America may provide additional material of interest.)

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003)
3. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
4. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia, 2002)
5. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
6. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
7. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)
8. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
9. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994)
10. Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1974)

New Titles and MARC Records Released

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) subscribers now have access to 371 titles newly added to our online collection. MARC records for the additions may be downloaded for integration with library holdings (please see below for instructions).

With the 2015 release, the HEB collection now totals 4,680 titles. Highlights from the newest additions include:

• Expanded offerings from key HEB publishing partners: 59 books from Oxford University Press, 35 books from Princeton University Press, 29 books from Cambridge University Press, and 17 books from the University of California Press.
• Contributions from new collaborating publishers Oneworld Publications, Kent State University Press, Brill Academic Publishers, Beacon Press, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
• The launch of three new series: selected scholarship from the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti, Jewish Cultural Studies from the Littman Library, and the first installments in the ACLS Centennial series to commemorate the founding of the organization in 1919.
• One hundred sixteen titles that have received awards from ACLS constituent societies.
• Titles recommended to HEB by our newest contributing ACLS constituent society, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
• The incorporation of two new areas of research: Hip-Hop Studies and Animal Studies.
• Nine additional books written by ACLS Fellows.

MARC Records 

MARC records for all titles in the collection are available for free download on our website. If you are a librarian at one of HEB’s subscribing institutions, please follow this link to download a zip file (acls12.zip) containing 363 records for our 371 newly released fall 2015 titles. (Note that one record may cover multiple volumes of the same title.)

New subscribers or those who have not recently updated their MARC records for the collection should instead download the cumulative file acls1-12.zip (covering all titles in rounds 1-12).

If downloading the new records only, please be sure to also remove the six MARC records corresponding to titles removed in this round from your library catalog. These can be found in a file called acls12_REMOVED.zip. (A list of all titles removed from the collection to date can be found here.)

For any additional questions regarding cataloging and MARC records, don’t hesitate to contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

HEB User Manual

In response to feedback from our subscribers, we have developed a User Manual for the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection that librarians can download and share with colleagues. Designed to maximize your institution's use of HEB, this convenient document contains useful information about navigating and using the HEB website; downloading MARC records; proxy server configuration; running usage stats; the content of the collection; our XML, Handheld and Print-On-Demand titles; and more.

Download the HEB User Manual here: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/help/for-librarians.html#Anchor-Manual

Collection Updates and Pricing for 2016

This fall, we are adding 371 new books to our collection, which will bring the total number of titles to 4,680 books. We are excited to be expanding categories such as World War I History, Women's Studies, and Religion/Theology; increasing our offerings from longtime contributors such as Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press; and adding two new fields of study, Hip Hop Studies and Animal Studies, among other updates. (Please look for an announcement about the release in the coming weeks.) Our latest additions represent an increase of our holdings of over 8%, to which all subscribing institutions automatically have access.

We also want to take this opportunity to inform you about our 2016 pricing and let you know in advance that, starting on January 1, subscription rates will be going up for all subscription tiers by between 2.4% and 3%. This modest increase is necessary in order to cover administrative overhead and maintain the collection. Our updated prices can be found here.

Please don't hesitate to contact us with any additional questions at subscriptions@hebook.org.

Forthcoming WWI Titles

As part of its upcoming fall 2015 title release, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to be adding ten books from Oxford University Press that represent significant contributions to the field of World War I scholarship. These books span topics in Military History, Maritime History, Politics, and Science & Technology, providing new insights into the conflict nearly a century after armistice. Among the books to be added to the platform are Alan Kramer's Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War and a new edition of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which won the 1976 National Book Award.

Villa I Tatti Series

Launching later this summer, as part of ACLS Humanities E-Book's (HEB) 2015 release of more than 370 new titles, is our new Villa I Tatti series. We are making these books available in collaboration with Harvard University Press and The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, whose Villa I Tatti program is dedicated to advanced research in all aspects of the Italian Renaissance. Since its inception in 1961, I Tatti has welcomed over 1000 Fellows working in the fields of Italian Renaissance art, history, literature and music. The research center has thus generated some of the most significant scholarship on the Italian Renaissance published over the last decades, and several of these works will now be featured as part of HEB's online collection.

Our initial entries will consist of eighteen titles published since 2000; with subjects ranging from women's political power in Renaissance Italy to the papal court in the fifteenth century and the role of astrology in the Duchy of Milan.

New HEB Areas: Hip Hop Studies and Animal Studies

As part of its upcoming 2015 title release, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be adding Hip Hop Studies as a new area of study. Books in this field slated for release to our online platform later this summer are: Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop by Jeff Chang (ed.) (Basic Civitas, 2006);  Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (Basic Civitas, 2003) and Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop (Basic Civitas, 2007) by Michael Eric Dyson; The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop by Murray Forman (Wesleyan University Press, 2002); The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture by Bakari Kitwana (Basic Civitas, 2003); The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters by Tricia Rose (Basic Civitas, 2008); and Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop by Joseph Schloss (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).

We will also be adding two initial titles in the new field of Animal Studies, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Kathleen Kete's The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (University of California Press, 1994).

Certain traditional fields of study, such as history, have always been prominent within the HEB collection; by delving into newer fields, HEB hopes to ensure that all disciplines relevant to contemporary scholars, both established and emerging, are represented.

We anticipate that more works will be added to both  areas as our collection evolves.

ACLS Centennial Series

As part of its upcoming 2015 title release, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be making available five initial entries in its new ACLS Centennial Series, a selection of books authored by prominent contributors to ACLS to commemorate its founding in 1919. A number of these titles will be included with each release over the next five years, leading up to ACLS's 100-year anniversary in 2019. (Read  about our founding and history here.)

Slated for initial release later this summer are three books originally published in the 1910s and '20s: John Erskine, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, and Other Essays (1915); The Elizabethan Lyric: A Study (1916); and Democracy and Ideals: A Definition (1920);  The Rise of Universities (1923) by Charles Homer Haskins, the first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies; and J. Franklin Jameson's The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926). These books exemplify the scholarly achievements that ACLS and its originators have fostered over the last century.

We look forward to bringing additional titles in this series to our readers in the future.

HEB at ALA Annual 2015

Come see HEB at the upcoming American Library Association Annual Conference!

We will be at Booth 438 and happy to answer any questions and discuss the collection with current and prospective subscribers. We are excited about our upcoming title release, scheduled for late summer. Our 371 forthcoming titles include 124 prize-winning works and three new series: the Villa I Tatti series from Harvard University Press, the Jewish Cultural Studies series from Littman Library, and the ACLS Centennial series, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the American Council of Learned Societies.

If you'd like to schedule an appointment, drop us a line at info@hebook.org.

ALA 2015 takes place in San Francisco, June 25-30. Please visit the official website to register and for further details.

We hope to see you in San Francisco!

New Titles Forthcoming in 2015

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to present our list of 370 new titles to be added to the collection in late summer 2015. Follow this link to download a spreadsheet listing each title with publication information and subject area.

Highlights of this title release include:

• 59 additional titles from Oxford University Press, including notable books on World War I
• 35 titles from Princeton University Press
• 29 titles from Cambridge University Press
• 17 titles from University of California Press
• Contributions from several publishers new to HEB: Beacon Press, Brill Academic Publishers, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Kent State University Press,

 Oneworld Publications
• 18 entries in HEB's new Villa I Tatti series, from Harvard University Press
• 4 entries in our new Jewish Cultural Studies series from Littman Library
• 5 entries in our new ACLS Centennial Series
• 7 Hip Hop Studies titles, representing an area newly added to HEB
• 124 books awarded prizes from esteemed scholarly societies and organizations 

For additional information on forthcoming books, please contact info@hebook.org.

HEB at ATLA in Denver

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be an exhibitor at the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) conference, taking place June 18-20 at the Marriott Tech Center in Denver, CO. Visit the conference website for details and registration information.

Lee Walton, HEB's National Library Account Manager, will be giving a presentation on “Perceptions of Academic Librarians Regarding E-Books and the Humanities” on Friday, June 19, at 11:00 AM.

And stop by the booth for an overview of what's new at HEB, and details of our upcoming title release in late summer.

Additional Participating Publishers for 2015

HEB is pleased to announce partnerships with two additional publishers for its upcoming 2015 title release, slated for late summer. Beacon Press and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute will both be making valuable contributions to the platform in a wide range of research areas.

HEB now has partnerships with 117 publishers. The list 
of participants in our growing network of university and commercial presses can be found here and is expected to continue to grow in the coming months.

The Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524

A reissue of The Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524: Interpretations, Methods, Database, edited by Monique O’Connell, is now available in the HEB collection with an updated preface. The new preface contains a users’ guide to the revised version of the online database (edited by Benjamin G. Kohl, Andrea Mozzato and O'Connell) that accompanies this edition.

Rulers of Venice was originally published in 2009 by ACLS Humanities E-Book in collaboration with the Renaissance Society of America, and represents one of HEB’s interactive XML editions. The monograph component consists of four case studies about the ruling class of Venice in the 14th and 15th centuries. The essays were intended to provide background information and complement an online database that has at its core the nine registers of the Segretario alle Voci, listing the noble Venetians elected to office from 1340 to 1524. This includes transcriptions of a total of 70,000 records with as complete information as possible for each officeholder, derived from 1500 frames of digitized microfilm (which are also available to users for closer examination). The database underwent substantial technical upgrades starting in 2012, and now offers enhanced search capabilities to improve users’ experience while still drawing on the same data.

Who held office in late medieval Venice? The Rulers of Venice project as a whole attempts to answer this seemingly simple question. While there is extensive documentation relating to Venetian elections between 1324 and 1524, determining whether a particular individual held office in Venice or not often turns out to be bafflingly complex. The database represents an invaluable tool for students of Venetian history, allowing researchers to gain a much deeper understanding of the way the Republic’s politics intersected with family strategies and individual careers.

This book and the accompanying database are freely available on an open-access basis.

HEB Joins Association of American Publishers (AAP)

As of March 2015, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is a member of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

AAP is the trade association for U.S. book publishers, providing advocacy and communications on behalf of the industry. There are currently 300 members of AAP, spanning all categories of publishing: commercial, educational and professional, university presses and scholarly societies. AAP represents the industry’s priorities in ensuring copyright protection, encouraging funding for quality educational materials, and protecting freedom of speech and publication around the world; as well as providing support to its members in adapting to the changing environment of book and journal publishing in the digital era.

HEB at ACRL in Portland

HEB will be an exhibitor at the Association of College & Research Libraries meeting, taking place March 25-28, in Portland, OR. This year's theme is sustainability. Visit the conference website for details and registration info.

We will be at Booth 271, and look forward to your visit. Stop by for an overview of what's new at HEB, and details of our upcoming title release this summer. If you'd like to schedule an appointment ahead of time, write to us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

HEB at ARLIS 2015

HEB will be an exhibitor at the upcoming 43rd Annual Conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) in Fort Worth, Texas, from March 19-23. Come find us there at Booth 54.

To schedule an appointment in advance, please contact HEB's National Academic Library Account Manager, Lee Walton, who will be representing us at the event, at lwalton@hebook.org.

HEB's Top Ten Titles for July 2014-December 2014

As we do every six months, HEB is pleased to once again present our list of top-hit titles, this time for the second half of 2014. While most of the titles below are perennial bestsellers, a first-time entry is David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001).

As in the previous few semesters we are observing a growing interest among our readership in African studies, and a strong ongoing interest in race and racism, nationalism and colonialism. For those interested in exploring some of these topics further, we recommend HEB's Pinterest board of titles pertaining to Race in America.

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. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)
4. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia)
5. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
6. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
7. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
8. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
9. Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
10. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001)

New Participating Publishers for 2015

Three new publishers will be partnering with HEB for its 2015 title release. We are delighted to announce that Brill Publishing, Oneworld Publications, and Kent State University Press will each be adding scholarly titles to the platform that exemplify the level of quality and breadth of research that we strive to offer our subscribers.

HEB now has partnerships with 115 publishers, including university and commercial presses. The full list can be found here and is expected to continue to grow in the coming months.

HEB YouTube Channel Launches

HEB has just officially launched its new YouTube Channel. Today, you can find an introduction to the collection as well as instructional videos on how to search the collection and navigate an e-book.

We will be adding new content periodically introducing various aspects of the HEB collection, so please be sure to subscribe. If you have any suggestions for future videos you’d like to see, please write to us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

New on HEB: Grounds for Play: The Nauṭaṅkī Theatre of North India

ACLS Humanites E-Book (HEB) has recently made available a new edition of Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India by Kathryn Hansen. This interactive XML-encoded update of the original 1992 edition has been enhanced with audio clips of interviews and performances, twenty-five additional images, and excerpts of Hindi source materials.

In Grounds for Play, Hansen draws on field research and archival holdings to investigate the social history and meanings of the Nautanki theater of northern India, a form embedded in premodern peasant society. The performances are comprised of many elements: music, dance, poetry, oral storytelling traditions, and written texts. Hansen shows how Nautanki explores important social issues such as political authority, community identity and gender differences.

Grounds for Play won the Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 1994. The book has been adopted for courses in world theater, folklore, ethnomusicology, gender studies, and South Asian history and culture.

Grounds for Play is part of HEB's ACLS Fellows' Publications series. Please find other titles from this series here.

Littman Library: Jewish Cultural Studies Series

As part of its forthcoming title release in summer 2015, the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) collection will feature the first five installments of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization's Jewish Cultural Studies series. These titles, edited by Simon J. Bronner, focus on the concept of Jewish identity as perceived by both Jews and non-Jews, exploring the cultural dimensions of concepts such as homeland and diaspora, assimilation and separation; as well as cultural institutions like the media, museums, schools and synagogues; and examining these from both religious and secular perspectives. The series is published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization for the Jewish Section of the American Folklore Society, one of the 31 learned societies that work with HEB on collection development.

The Littman Library is a respected leader in Jewish Studies titles; 28 volumes of its ongoing series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry are currently already available as part of the HEB collection.