DESCRIPTION OF ACLS HUMANITIES E-BOOK

The HEB Website

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is available to entire campuses, not just to workstations at the library. Using any World Wide Web browser (such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari), 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.

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 important book reviews. 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 quick and easy Internet access, full-text designed for comfortable on-screen reading, hypertext links for efficient navigation among text, bibliographies, citations, endnotes, and appendices.

HEB titles appear exactly as in the original editions for ease of reference and citation. New XML titles are enhanced with hypertext links and search features, some with direct links to web-based digital archives of appropriate source materials so that the reader can access many of the original source materials used by the author; and some titles feature enhanced illustrations, graphs, charts, maps, and other visual materials, often in full color, as well as video, sound, and music in appropriate titles. Illustrations in certain titles may also be viewed, searched, and sorted through special viewing software housed at DLPS.

The Subscribing Libraries

The long-term success of HEB is closely tied to its availability. The HEB website is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through university and college libraries and through major public research libraries. It is now also being made available through nearly three dozen consortia to local and community libraries throughout the United States and the world, as well as to secondary schools, both for its content and its usefulness as a research-skills tool. It currently reaches a combined FTE of over 5 million. Beyond this, as the HEB collection has grown, it is also now available to individuals through their membership in any of the 70 ACLS constituent learned societies for a reasonable fee.

Accessing HEB

HEB is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A full campus subscription to the HEB collection includes access from any Internet-connected location on campus, unlimited use, and remote access from home or on the road via the campus network, without simultaneous user restrictions.

Usage statistics by title are tracked by DLPS and reported to participating libraries and Humanities E-Book, which shares these statistics with publishers and authors when reporting royalties. Fair-use rights and restrictions apply to printing and downloading.

HEB Titles

HEB incorporates two different types of electronic books: new XML-encoded titles, and scanned page-image versions of already-published titles.

XML Titles

HEB has produced a select list of new titles in history, in XML format. The aim has been to create electronic works of unquestioned quality, subject to the rigorous review process currently used in the selection of print books. See the XML Titles page for a list of all XML books currently available online. To view a list of XML features with links to sample pages, go to the XML Features page.

Page-Image Titles

Each year, a group of approximately 500 already-published titles are converted into electronic format to create a core group of books that will expand this central electronic publishing space. These titles contain exact page images of the print book and are searchable by multiple OCR-scanned text.

What titles have been included? They are all especially valuable, time-tested books, regularly consulted by scholars and advanced students. While some of them are currently out of print, over 80% are titles currently in print with publishers and nearly 85% are under copyright. The criteria for inclusion in the collection stress a title’s importance to humanistic studies, not its print status.

Together, the new XML e-books and converted titles comprise the HEB collection. Approximately 6,000 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 our 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, either in full text or through links to other sites, including JSTOR, Project MUSE, and the History Cooperative, to expand the context of the discussion for each title or cluster of titles. Our titles are also indexed in the MLA bibliography

Finally HEB asks the authors of new XML history 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, works that form the key factual and theoretical frame. Once these lists are determined, HEB makes every effort not only to include them within the collection, but also facilitates the processes by which they can be actively hyperlinked to the newly-created titles. This provides added value for the author who will be able to use electronic works while engaged in his or her own research and writing. 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 in new and exciting ways for both authors and readers.

Expanding the Collection

The collection was never intended as a fixed canon but as an expanding library. We are now working closely with several new participating learned societies to assist them in identifying new fields and appropriate titles for electronic publication and to encourage more, not fewer, titles to enter the HEB collection.

HEB has recently added titles in Australasia/Oceania, Byzantium, Comparative/World, Methods/Theory, Native People of the Americas, and Women’s Studies and is building lists in the following fields: Archaeology, Art & Architectural History, Dance & Performance History, Film & Media Studies, Folklore, Literature, Musicology, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion.

If you would like to suggest a title or a list of titles for inclusion in this series, send an e-mail to Collection Development, providing as much information as possible on the full title, author, publisher, publication date, the major reasons for including it in a select series, 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.


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