PSP 2016 Annual Conference

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) will be attending the Association of American Publishers' (AAP) 2016 PSP Annual Conference, "The Agile Publisher: Integration, Innovation & Transformation," in Washington, DC, February 3-5, 2016. More info about the event is available here.

If you are among the publishers attending, and would like to meet with HEB, please contact us at info@hebook. We'd love to hear from you.

HEB Content is Available Only Through HEB

Happy 2016 from ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB)! We wanted to take this opportunity to thank our subscribers and remind them that, although HEB collaborates with a number of discovery services by providing them with metadata for our books, our curated title list is not available via any other aggregators, and viewing a title is possible only through direct authorization by us of a subscribing institution’s IPs. Simply put, the only way to access the HEB collection is to subscribe to HEB.

Furthermore, the content offered on our platform is for the most part unduplicated. Our research shows that an average of 90% of the HEB collection is unique and does not overlap with the title lists made available by a number of other providers (such as JSTOR, Project MUSE, ebrary, EBSCO Academic and EBL Ebook Library). The HEB collection is centered on backlist titles of enduring value to research and teaching, and HEB frequently offers the only digital versions of these books currently available.

For more info on accessing the collection, please contact subscriptions@hebook.org.

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.