The humanities: who won the '90s in scholarly book publishing

The study of prizes awarded to books in the 1990s by leading humanities scholarly associations tells much about the disciplines, publishing, and libraries during that decade. This article examines data on prize-winners of the American Historical Association, the American Musicological Society, the College Art Association, and the Modern Language Association. For the prize-winners, it reports the distribution of winners among publishers and universities; extent of cross-disciplinary publishing; degree of co-authorship; trends in library acquisitions of print versions; and accessibility of electronic versions. The University of California Press and the faculty at the university’s Berkeley campus ranked first; the American Historical Association awarded nearly half of its prizes to books classified outside history; there was little co-authorship; library holdings appeared to decline over the decade; and roughly 15% of prize winners were available through netLibrary by the summer of 2001.