INTRODUCTION

The New E-Book: A Digital Portal

Each year the world community creates five exabytes of new information, including scholarship, in stored media in the form of paper, film, magnetic, and optical media. These narratives, documents, texts, databases, visual and aural resources and their analyses are enough to replicate the Library of Congress’s print collection 37,000 times over (Lyman & Varian, 2003). This figure has grown by 30% a year. Only one-tenth of one percent of this material is created in print. This reality poses an unprecedented challenge and opportunity for scholarly communication in the humanities. The print “monograph”was long the staple in the humanities for both scholarly communication and professional assessment—250 print pages bound between two hard covers and physically distributed to 500 libraries and a few dozen interested scholars. But this is increasingly giving way to the electronic book that allows both writers and readers to survey a vast array of primary and secondary source materials now available, and to analyze and to derive a theoretical frame from these materials.

Just as the collection of footnotes in the traditional print article or monograph once acted as a portal to other scholarship in the print domain, so now the hyperlink, the pop-up image, and the database serve the same purpose of scholarly focus and referral. In a certain sense, then, each new e-book acts like the old print footnote or bibliography: as a portal to the best and most useful scholarship available on any given topic. But like its print analog, the digital book remains the work of the individual or of individuals in collaboration, with limited access and subjective approaches to primary sources and their interpretation.

Thus no one e-book—or single website no matter how comprehensive for a given subject—can possibly incorporate all the necessary referents to the quantity of material now available in any one discipline, area, or research agenda. Only well constructed digital collections that pay special attention to collaboration, and the quality, interoperability, and depth of their content can even hope to begin to achieve this goal.

Humanities E-Book

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is an online collection of over 1,700 books of high quality in the humanities, accessible through institutional and individual subscription. These are works of major importance, from 250 publishers, that remain vital to both scholars and advanced students, and are frequently cited in the literature. (See title list.) HEB, which launched in September 2002, now adds approximately 500 books annually to the collection, as well as a carefully selected list of new XML titles that have the potential to use web-based technologies to communicate the results of scholarship in new ways.

To guarantee the scope and quality of this interdisciplinary collection, ACLS is collaborating with twelve learned societies and nearly 95 university presses to assist scholars in the electronic publishing of high-quality works in the humanities, to explore the intellectual possibilities of new technologies, and to help assure the continued viability of scholarship in today’s changing publishing environment.

Fields currently covered include Area Studies in the following: Australasian/Oceanian, Byzantine, Canadian, Caribbean, Native Peoples, Women’s Studies. Historical Studies include African, American, Asian, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian, Economic, European, Latin American, Legal, Methods/Theory, Middle East, and Science/Technology. HEB also encompasses the fields of Art History, Literature, Political Science, and Religion. Forthcoming fields include Archaeology, Folklore, History of Medicine, History of Philosophy and Musicology.

HEB was originally funded as the ACLS History E-Book Project in June 1999 by a $3-million, five-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Now in its second phase, HEB achieved self-sustainability in the spring of 2005 and became ACLS Humanities E-Book in January 2007.

HEB has eight major goals:

1. Encourage scholars to plan and write e-books.
2. Encourage scholarly presses to experiment with, to consider the issues involved in, and to develop in-house expertise for, electronic publishing.
3. Streamline production and reduce costs.
4. Develop infrastructure for archiving scholarly texts for the long term.
5. Work with others to ensure that the commercialization of intellectual materials does not hinder the exercise of scholarly communication and fair use.
6. Work closely with scholarly journals and learned societies to ensure that humanities e-books are properly reviewed and promoted.
7. Encourage libraries to purchase and make widely available humanistic works of high quality within their emerging e-collections.
8. Actively encourage the acceptance of e-books within the academy for the purposes of hiring, tenure, promotion, and related professional concerns.
   

HEB offers the following benefits:

• a comprehensive reviewed collection, chosen by professional scholars
• full text
• a fully integrated, cross-searchable format
• universal and 7/24 access to all members of the campus community
• unlimited usage for course reserve and classroom use
• elimination of off-site, missing, and damaged print copies
• in-depth full-text, rather than extract, search results
• free downloadable MARC records and usage statistics.
• an expanding collection of POD titles.
  

HEB02.01
rev. 6/16/08