New Titles Forthcoming January 2011

HEB’s eighth round of new titles is forthcoming in January 2011. This includes 543 electronic books covering a wide range of disciplines and fields. Among the most prominent new additions are another 141 titles in Film and Media Studies, 46 more in Philosophy, 57 in Central and Eastern European Studies, 41 in Music and Musicology, 33 in Jewish Studies, as well as 29 more in Bibliography and 30 in Linguistics and Literature. 

With these new additions HEB will retain its core concentrations in History and expand strong collections in Women’s Studies (254 titles total), Literature (138), Music and Musicology (127), Latin American Studies (114), Middle Eastern (112) and Mediterranean-Byzantine Studies (67), and Methods and Theory (84), among other fields across the Humanities.

In all, this brings the HEB collection to nearly 3,335 titles, with nearly 1.2 million pages and 90,000 images, in three full-text formats (page-image, text, PDF), fully cross-searchable, with hyperlinks to online reviews in the major journals and complete MARC records.

Click here to download the forthcoming list as an Excel spreadsheet sortable by author, title, or ISBN.

HEB Publishes White Paper 3

HEB announces the publication of its third white paper, Handheld E-Book Readers and Scholarship: Report and Reader Survey, written by Nina Gielen, HEB Editor for Digital Content and Production. This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by HEB in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers. 

Scholarly content generally involves extensive networking and cross-referencing between individual works through various channels, including bibliographical citation and subsequent analysis and discussion. Through past experience with its online collection, HEB had already determined that a web-based platform lends itself well to presenting this type of material, but was interested in exploring which key elements would need to be replicated in the handheld edition in order to maintain the same level of functionality, as well as what specific factors from either print or digital publishing would have to be taken into account. As sample content, HEB selected six titles from its own online collection, three in a page-image format with existing OCR-derived text and three encoded as XML files, and had these converted by an outside vendor with minimal editorial intervention into both MOBI (prc) and ePub files.

The white paper reports on two phases of the study: an in-house evaluation of various e-book readers by HEB staff, and a reader survey. The white paper also includes an overview of the process of converting titles for handheld e-readers, including conversion costs. 

HEB’s initial findings indicate that titles formatted for then-existing handheld devices are not yet adequate for scholarly use in terms of replicating either the benefits of online collections — cross-searchability, archiving, multifarious interactive components — nor certain aspects of print editions that users reported missing, such as being able to mark up and rapidly skim text. A turnaround is underway once a common and more robust format optimized for handheld readers is determined and devices themselves continue to evolve, adding improved display options and better and more intuitive web-access, searching and other interactive use of content.

For reports on the white paper, see Digital Koans (September 6, 2010) and  The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The white paper is available free online in either HTML or searchable, downloadable PDF and in print for a modest fee.

The English Institute Goes Born-Digital

HEB announces the publication of a new born-digital, XML title: On Periodization, edited by Virginia Jackson of Tufts University and published by The English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This partnership between HEB and the English Institute is especially important: it represents our first born-digital title in literary studies and the Institute’s first venture into publishing the multimedia that reflect the growing importance of the digital in literary analysis. 

This book is the latest in the series of English Institute publications. For seven decades, The English Institute has been a major resource for developments in criticism, theory, and scholarship, while honoring traditional fields of interest and modes of literary analysis. This volume presents selected papers from the 2008 annual English Institute conference, held at Harvard University. It includes the work of seven scholars from among papers presented at the conference. Previous volumes — already offered in our English Institute series — include many of the most important literary critics of the past three generations. According to English Institute Trustee William Germano, “This collaboration is a terrific opportunity for us. With digital access, hyperlinks, and audio and visual enhancements, our new series brings the English Institute into the electronic present.” 

The English Institute and HEB are already at work on the next born-digital title in the series, which will present papers from the 2009 conference. This new, born-digital series is edited by Meredith L. McGill of Rutgers University.

HEB is pleased to be hosting this distinguished series and to be The English Institute’s partner in this continuing collaboration. See a complete list of our XML titles.

Highest Praise for Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital

R. Burr Litchfield’s Florence Ducal Capital has received another rave review. Laurie Nussdorfer, analyzing the book in the latest issue of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, writes, “If there were a book ideally suited to appear in a digital edition, it is this magisterial study of the social geography of Florence in the first century of the Medici grand dukes.… The E-Book partners brilliantly with Litchfield’s online gazetteer… [a] magnificent resource.… The book’s real value…is to provide a model for how to analyze and visualize a society in transition. As such, Litchfield’s example will hopefully inspire similar studies of other urban communities and ultimately foster a genuinely comparative history of urban change.”

We could not agree more. This title is both born-digital and open-access. See a complete list of our XML titles.

Scott Palmer Surveys the Digital Humanities

In the latest News Net (May/June 2010, 50.3) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Scott Palmer’s “Academic Publishing in the Digital Age” surveys the current landscape of digital humanities: JSTOR, MUSE, the JSAH, the university presses and the “digital transition,” various e-book platforms and e-readers, including the Kindle and iPad. He examines the Institute for the Future of the Book, George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, Web 2 and 3 capabilities, the impact of mega-corporations like Microsoft, Apple and Google, and the efforts of government and private foundations, including NEH, MacArthur, Mellon and ACLS. Among the “impressive” multimedia projects he cites is ACLS Humanities E-Book’s XML series. 

Prof. Palmer then devotes many of his final remarks to the importance of a new digital literacy among humanists themselves and the opportunities and challenges that this new fluency carry for the academy. “We should be prepared to be buffeted by continuing whirlwinds of change,” he concludes. 

Scott Palmer comes to the topic with first-hand knowledge and experience: he is the author of HEB’s XML multimedia version of Dictatorship of the Air (Cambridge UP, HEB e-book, 2007) and now serves as editor-in-chief of The Russian Front website. 

Who’s Reading HEB

While we do not track individual users or sessions, every month we compile statistics on the breakdown of our subscribers by FTE size, by Carnegie classification, by more general type of institutions, and by country. These numbers offer some interesting information on our readership, where it is concentrated geographically, and at what types of schools. received another rave review. 

HEB currently has 633 institutional subscribers with a combined FTE of 5,335,916, according to the latest figures available. Of these 633 institutions nearly three-quarters (463, or 73.1%) are at college and universities, and these have a combined FTE enrollment of just over 3.5 million. The second-highest concentration of institutional subscribers is among the 125 non-U.S. schools for a combined FTE of just over 1.7 million, or 19.4% of the total. After that the next-highest grouping is among secondary schools (28, or 4.42%) with a total enrollment of 19,308.The latter tend to be the traditional prep schools where the humanities continue to hold a central place in the curriculum.

If we look at the classifications by type of institution, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. As one might expect, the largest concentration by FTE (1.7 million) is among the 80 Extensive schools: the highest level research institutions offering doctoral degrees. (32 Intensive schools provided 5% of the total or an FTE of 438,205). Yet the highest number of schools (113) is among the Master’s I designation: the smaller public and some private baccalaureate colleges that also grant Masters degrees. The next largest in numbers (89) is currently among institutions granting Associate’s degrees. Though small in FTE (460,772 total), the number of these schools is significant, since it appears to indicate (borne out by direct anecdotal information) that schools are using HEB for collection development to stretch acquisitions dollars or to serve new constituencies and accrediting criteria. In the middle stand the three levels of baccalaureate institutions, the various levels of traditional liberal arts colleges (113 schools in all or 17.8%), for a combined FTE of 190,152. In the past, many of these schools, we were told, acquired HEB not so much for its content (many of these titles are already in their print collections), as for HEB’s exemplary nature as a highly peer-reviewed digital collection. While quality remains key, these liberal arts libraries are also now leading a trend in acquisitions away from print and toward the digital.

Returning to those 125 non-US schools, subscribers are spread across the globe in 29 countries. As one might expect, Anglophone nations predominate, with the United Kingdom (30), Canada (25), Australia (12), and Ireland (7) together accounting for 59% of non-US institutions and a combined FTE of 1.26 million. All the continents are included. China, where HEB has begun a new initiative, has 8 institutional subscribers. In India HEB is currently in the middle of several large-scale, college consortial trials.

FTE is no guarantee that anyone at an institution is reading online or using HEB, yet our usage stats bear out the general picture: from 2008 to 2009 hits across the entire collection, then about 2300 titles, rose almost 54%, from 3.3 million to 5.1 million, while the total number of subscribing institutions (and FTE) stayed fairly stable, rising about 3%. This means that the collection continues to be more and more intensively used and embedded in online catalogs and course syllabi. In further HEB News posts, we’ll continue to report regularly on the top titles being used in the collection. 

New and Improved Site Features

Thanks to ongoing structural improvements on our website provided by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, our readers will now notice several overall upgrades in interface and performance. These include multiple viewing sizes, the improvement of image quality—most especially in books with numerous grayscale illustrations—and a smoother and more consistent page transition. We’ve also added many new online reviews to new and previously added titles.

Readers will also note new features and improvements in our library of XML titles, including many new links to related scholarship within HEB; newly formatted page-break indicators in print-derived XML books (in direct response to reader feedback); and improved pop-up functionality.

These join the improved functionalities added over the past two years: page-viewing options that now include page-image, PDF, and text views (allowing citation copy-and-paste within Fair-Use guidelines); the ability to print and download up to three pages at a time; and the addition of numerous publisher series. All in all we think these changes make our site even more user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate. We welcome your continued comments and suggestions for further improvements.