‘Choice’ Names Its Top 25 Academic Books for 2011

Editors at Choice, a publication of the Association for College and Research Libraries, have named their top 25 academic titles for the year, along with a top 10 of Web sites. The alphabetical, non-ranked list of 25 titles sees university presses and trade houses running neck and neck with university presses 12 books, trade publishers 12 books, and a skirmish sure to develop over where to slot Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. While not an AAUP member, CSHL says it’s on a “campus,” so we say no contest.

Choice’s full “Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011″ list comprises 629 titles across 54 disciplines and appears in the magazine’s January 2012 issue. Non-subscribers can register for a free online trial to check it out.

The Troubled Future of the 19th-Century Book

The future is uncertain for circulating library collections in the wake of wide-scale digitization, and particularly so for scholars who study the "long" 19th century. Let me explain. In most cases, pre-1800 books have been moved to special collections, and, under the 1998 copyright law, post-1923 materials remain in copyright and thus on the shelves for circulation. But academic libraries are now increasingly reconfiguring access to public-domain texts via online repositories such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library. As a result, library policy makers are anticipating the withdrawal of less-used print collections of books that are not rare in favor of digital surrogates. Large portions of 19th-century print materials will fall into that category.