ACLS Humanities E-Book collection

The Folger has an annual subscription to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Humanities E-Book collection, which makes over 5,000 scholarly titles in the humanities available to onsite researchers. You can search and browse the collection (including full-text searching within a title) through the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) interface by connecting to the Folger's wifi network or using an onsite Folger computer. Records for all books, with persistent links to the online versions, can also be found in the catalog. Note that because these e-books are "rented" rather than purchased, the Folger cannot guarantee that a given title will continue to be available. If you find a dead link in the catalog, please let us know so that the record can be removed.

Fields covered

As of August 2018, fields covered include: "African History, American History, Animal Studies, Archaeology, Art and Architectural History, Asian History, Australasian/Oceanian History, Biblical Studies, Bibliographic Studies, Byzantine History, Canadian History, Caribbean History, Central European History, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian History, Economic History, Environmental Studies, European History, Film and Media Studies, Folklore, Hip Hop Studies, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American History, Law, LGBT/Queer Studies, Linguistics, Literature, Literary Criticism, Medicine, Methods/Theory, Middle Eastern History, Musicology, Native Peoples of the Americas, Performance Studies (theater, music, dance), Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Science/Technology, Sociology and Women’s Studies."

Catalog records

MARC records for HEB titles are provided en masse, and batch-loaded into the catalog. This means that many titles fall outside the scope of the Folger's collection development policy, but because they have no effect on shelf space or subscription price, it's not worth the cost in staff time to identify and remove them. Instead, an advisory statement is added to each record at the time of upload.

Annual updates come in two sets: MARC records for titles ACLS has added to the collection (which are uploaded to the catalog), and a spreadsheet of titles ACLS has removed from the collection. Records for titles removed from the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection are deleted from the catalog, and archived on the server.

For a list of the bulk edits made to these records, see the MARC records from vendors article.