Submission Guidelines

All long-form articles should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents through the link above.

Generally, long-form articles should be 7,500–9,000 words, excluding notes. HLB has historically agreed to publish very long articles; while we may continue to do so at our discretion, such articles may be divided into parts and published separately.

Long-form articles will be distributed for blind peer review. Authors should remove all identifying details from the manuscript document, including their name(s), contact details, and personal acknowledgments. Instead, authors should upload a title page with this information.

Please prepare the manuscript using the following formatting guidelines:

Page setup

Please follow the default page format settings in Word:

• Letter page size (8.5” x 11”)
• Default margins (1.25” left and right; 1” top and bottom)
• Left alignment
• Page numbers in upper right header

All text should be double-spaced and set in 12-point Times New Roman.

Headings

To facilitate online publishing and reading, authors should divide articles into sections with headings. Headings should be in Bold Title Case.

Citation and Style

Articles may be submitted in any recognized academic citation style. Upon acceptance, the author will be expected to convert citations to Chicago style. HLB’s style sheet provides more detailed information on style and copyediting.

Images

Do not embed images in the Word document; instead, upload a compressed folder of images separately from the manuscript. Images should be formatted as TIFF or JPEG files. Please identify each image by file name: fig01.jpg, and indicate its location in the text (FIGURE 1) along with the caption.

High quality images are not expected at the time of submission. Upon acceptance, the author is responsible for acquiring both high quality images and the appropriate permissions.

Tables

Tables should be inserted using Microsoft Word’s table function rather than formatted manually, and should be placed where the author would like them to appear. Each table should be referenced explicitly in the text: (see Table 1). As with the illustrations, each table should be accompanied by a caption that begins with its identifying information, e.g. Table 1.

Translations

Articles should be submitted in English. Non-English passages of a few words may be included in the body of the article, italicized, and followed by a translation. When quoting non-English sources at length, please present the quotation in translation in the body of the text. The original quotation should be included in an accompanying footnote or as an appendix. The source of all translations should be cited appropriately; multiple translations by the author should be cited in the first instance, along with a note that the following translations are also the author’s work.

Permissions

Authors are responsible for securing permission for all copyrighted material, including images and lengthy quotations. We ask authors to provide proof of permission prior to copyediting and after the acceptance of their submission for publication.

Short-form content (typically 3,000 words max) should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents through the link above. Because these works will not undergo peer review, authors do not need to upload a separate title page.

Please prepare the manuscript using the following formatting guidelines:

Page setup

Please follow the default page format settings in Word:

• Letter page size (8.5” x 11”)
• Default margins (1.25” left and right; 1” top and bottom)
• Left alignment
• Page numbers in upper right header

All text should be double-spaced and set in 12-point Times New Roman.

Headings

Authors may divide their article into sections with headings. Headings should be in Bold Title Case.

Citation and Style

Articles may be submitted in any recognized academic citation style. Upon acceptance, the author will be expected to convert citations to Chicago style. HLB’s style sheet provides more detailed information on style and copyediting.

Images

Do not embed images in the Word document; instead, upload a compressed folder of images separately from the manuscript. Images should be formatted as TIFF or JPEG files. Please identify each image by file name: fig01.jpg, and indicate its location in the text (FIGURE 1) along with the caption.

High quality images are not expected at the time of submission. Upon acceptance, the author is responsible for acquiring both high quality images and the appropriate permissions.

HLB accepts submissions of Digital Humanities, digital scholarship, and digital media projects. Projects will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine if they should be sent for peer review.

Authors/creators should submit an abstract of the project that includes a project overview, a description of the Harvard Library collection(s) used, a methodology section if applicable, and the project’s disciplinary context(s); the project’s URL; and links to any data sets, corpora, databases, and/or code created for the project.

Members of the Harvard University community are welcome to submit announcements relating to the following categories:

• Collections recently acquired or now available for research, particularly those that are available digitally
• Publication of a monograph or other substantial work based on Harvard Library collections
• Milestone events related to Harvard Library

Announcements should be 1–3 sentences, and collections announcements should include the appropriate HOLLIS permalink. If a collection is not available digitally, please describe how researchers can access it. Submitters may include an accompanying image, which may be used at the editor’s discretion. Please submit announcements through the HLB Announcement Submission Form.

Lectures, exhibitions, symposia, and similar events should be announced through the Harvard Library events calendar or departmental/repository newsletters and social media channels. Currently, Harvard Library appointments, retirements, and departures are announced on the Comings and Goings wiki page.

Announcements are not credited to a particular author. Harvard Library employees should receive their supervisor or director’s permission prior to submitting.

Other style guidance is as follows:

Spelling

HLB follows Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary at merriam-webster.com, opting for the main or first entry when there are alternatives.

Quotations and punctuation

Quotations of more than five lines of prose or a stanza of poetry should be presented as block text, indented 0.5” on the left side using Word’s formatting feature and double-spaced. For inline quotation of poetry, line breaks should be represented by a forward slash (/) and stanza breaks by two forward slashes (//). Omission should be indicated by ellipses with a space on either side, e.g. omissions . . . side.

Inline quotations should be enclosed by double quotation marks (“”). Single quotation marks (‘’) should be reserved for quotations within quotations. Punctuation such as periods and commas should be placed inside quotations, regardless of the punctuation of the original source. Likewise, capitalization at the beginning of a quotation may be added silently, without placing the capitalized letter in brackets ([]).

In the case of early modern print, all italicization, capitalization, and font variation should be preserved, as well as the original spelling. The abbreviation [sic.] should be used sparingly, and only for errors in the original source that may confuse the reader.

Dates and numbers

Authors should include dates alongside the first mention of historical figures and their works, either parenthetically or as part of the prose. Regnal years, birth years, death years, and circa should be used when appropriate and indicated by ‘r.’ ‘b.’ ‘d.’ and ‘ca.’ (not italicized). Page numbers follow the same format. Both date and number ranges should be represented with an en dash (–) rather than a hyphen (-).

Specific dates should be formatted as month-day-year (September 8, 1836), without superscripts (8^th). Centuries should be written out in full, e.g. the seventeenth century. With the exception of page numbers, figure numbers, and dates, the numbers one through ten should be spelled out in full, as should numbers at the beginning of sentences (Eighteen years ago).

Inclusive language

HLB requests that authors use inclusive, affirmative language when describing people.

• Terms should, to the fullest extent possible, reflect the norms of the communities they reference.
• Mention of a person’s race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other characteristic should be relevant and important to the author’s discussion.
• Whenever possible, authors should strive to use gender- and sex-neutral terms for people and professions (i.e., “humanity” instead of “mankind”).
• Similarly, authors should avoid characterizing professions as male or female.
• Authors should avoid the construction “he/she”; instead, we endorse the third-person plural (“they”, “them”).