ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB)—a subscription-based online collection of over 2,200 digital titles in the humanities—undertook an experiment to investigate the possibility of a future mass conversion of e-books preexisting in a scanned, page-image format into XML-encoded files. HEB hypothesized that such a conversion, if doable, would create an overall more user-friendly collection, as the resulting books would be text-based, allowing for easier access and export of contents, and would include interactive features such as links and enlargeable figures. This report presents the findings from the experiment.