ACLS History E-Book Project Launched

The History E-Book Project has been in the works since the American Council of Learned Societies received a $3-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in mid-1999. The resulting project, which was officially launched in September 2002, includes the digitization of close to 500 seminal monographs in history, with many more to come. Once rights were obtained for each title, the manuscripts were scanned at high resolution and then converted using optical character recognition (OCR). The ebooks are housed and distributed using Digital Library Production Service, created by the University of Michigan. The result is a web-based interface to the collection that supports full-text searching (including Boolean and proximity) and browsing (title, author and subject) across the collection.

Accompanying the full-text of each monograph are the table of contents, reviews (from journals archived in JSTOR) and a catalog record, which includes detailed information about the print source and editing required after OCR. With the option of three magnification views, the text is quite easy to read on a quality computer monitor. Printing is possible, but it must be done one page at a time. The collection of titles is extremely Euro-centric with few, if any, titles dealing with the regions of Asia, South Asia, Africa and Latin and South America. However, for the study of American and European history, the collection is quite impressive. As of August, the titles fell into the following subject breakdown:

The collection includes imprints ranging from 1911 to 2002, with an average publication date of 1977. However, unlike the claims of Questia, most of these titles are in fact seminal titles in the study of American and European history. For instance, within European Middle Ages and Renaissance titles are renown authors such as Peter Brown, Henri Pirenne, Georges Duby, Caroline Walker Bynum, Hans Baron and Erwin Panofsky.

Although the collection is impressive, the History E-Book Project's interface could stand for some improvement. Navigation through the website, as well as through a given text, is extremely slow, sometimes taking more than ten seconds for a new page to load. The collection's search mechanism should be improved to remove some confusing traits. For instance, the "Seach within" drop-down menu contains 7 empty lines, which, if selected, will cause a syntax error. Search results are difficult to interpret. For example, a search on China as a subject heading "resulted in 3 matches in 3 works," when in reality the search resulted in 3 matches in only a single title. Browsing by subject is next to impossible, as the subject headings are not presented in any kind of hierarchy. As a result, the entry for James Madison comes after Niccolo Machiavelli and before Magnitogorsk (Russia).

Annual subscription rates are based on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, 2000 Edition and range between $300 and $1,300, with consortial discounts available. Another 500+ titles are forthcoming in 2003, including some several electronic front-list titles, which will include elements that capitalize on their electronic medium. For more information about the ACLS History E-Book Project, see its website at http://www.historyebook.org.