DESCRIPTION OF ACLS HUMANITIES E-BOOK
ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is available to entire campus communities. Using any World Wide Web browser, faculty, students, staff, and library patrons of subscribing institutions can view and search the HEB collection from campus offices, libraries, dorms, remotely off-campus, and through course reserve. An institutional subscription to HEB includes unlimited, simultaneous multi-user access from any Internet-connected location.
HEB is now available through more than three dozen consortia to libraries throughout the United States and the world. Important for both its content and its usefulness as a research tool, HEB currently reaches a combined FTE of over 5.3 million. The HEB collection is also now available to individuals through their membership in any of the 70 ACLS constituent learned societies for a reasonable fee.
The HEB collection allows users to perform keyword and Boolean searches, search full-text across all titles in the database, in selected titles, in a single title, or by select series, by author and title, as well as by Library of Congress subject headings for highly accurate results. Users may also search online book reviews from the major journals. Search engines allow readers to find text and graphics and to perform complex string searches for names, dates, phrases, or concepts in great depth and context.
The HEB collection offers a user-friendly interface that features well-formatted text and hypertext links for efficient navigation among text, bibliographies, citations, endnotes, and appendices.
Usage statistics by title are tracked by the University of Michigan and are available to participating libraries and Humanities E-Book, which shares these statistics with publishers and authors when reporting royalties. Instructions for accessing usage statistics are available on the Librarian Resources page. Fair-use rights and restrictions apply to printing and downloading.
HEB Titles
HEB incorporates two different types of electronic books: XML-encoded titles and digitized versions of already-published titles presented as text, page-image and PDF.
XML Titles
HEB continues to produce a select list of new titles in XML format. The aim has been to create electronic works of unquestioned quality, subject to the rigorous review process. Among these are several born-digital titles that take full advantage of the new media. See the XML Titles page for a list of all XML books currently available online or in production and deveopment. To view a list of XML features with links to sample pages, go to the XML Features page.
New XML titles feature enhanced illustrations, graphs, charts, maps, and other visual materials, often in full color, as well as video and sound in appropriate titles. Illustrations in certain titles may also be viewed, searched, and sorted through special viewing software housed at the University of Michigan. Several titles offer direct links to web-based digital archives so that the reader can access many of the original source documents used by the author.
Page-Image Titles
Each year, a group of approximately 500 already-published titles are converted into digital format to create a core group of books that expand this central electronic publishing space. These titles are presented as exact page images of the print book, as OCR-scanned text, and as PDFs.
Titles included are especially valuable, time-tested books, regularly consulted and cited by scholars and students. Approximately 90% are titles currently in print with publishers and under copyright. The criteria for inclusion in the collection stress a title’s importance to humanistic studies, not its print status. The collection currently contains over 1.2 million pages and 80,000 images.
The HEB Collection
Together, the new XML e-books and digitized titles comprise the HEB collection. Over 9,000 titles have now been reviewed and selected for possible conversion into electronic format. A List of Titles to which we have secured electronic rights is available online. See the growing List of Publishers who have contributed titles to the collection.
A distinctive and especially valuable feature of this collection is that all the works in this space are searchable as a collection and in depth: such an integrated electronic series greatly enhances the value of the aggregation to users and goes beyond the sum of its individual titles.
In addition, HEB includes the important reviews of these titles through links to other sites, including JSTOR and Project MUSE, expanding the context of the discussion for each title or cluster of titles. Our titles are also indexed in the MLA Bibliography.
Expanding the Collection
The collection was never intended as a fixed canon but as an expanding library. We are now working closely with twenty-three participating learned societies to assist them in identifying new fields and appropriate titles for electronic publication and to encourage an expanding HEB collection.
Finally HEB has asked the authors of our XML titles to provide us with a list of between 6 and 12 works that have framed the conceptual and factual background of their own study. Once these lists are determined, HEB makes every effort not only to include them within the collection, but also hyperlinks to the newly-created titles. Thus the collection forms essential clusters of related titles; and as HEB progresses and more new titles within a given field are accepted for electronic publication, these electronic clusters overlap and cross-fertilize.
If you would like to suggest a title or a list of titles for inclusion in HEB, send an e-mail to Collection Development, providing as much information as possible including the full title, author, publisher, publication date, the major reasons for including it, and any additional information that you consider helpful. We also encourage any constituent ACLS learned society with a humanities focus to contact the Directors about possible collaboration.
HEB02.01
rev. 12/9/11
