From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2016 14:10:58 -0700

Humanities Commons (https://news.hcommons.org) is an almost-started-up
start-up with Mellon funding that promises to be a strong digital
platform for support of humanities research and scholarly
communication.  They are about to go live, but that URL works for now
with some limited information.  The founding partners include the MLA,
College Art Association, Association for Jewish Studies, and the
Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.  The core
work seems to have come from the MLA with an earlier instantiation of
MLA Commons.

My sense is that we’ve all been looking for the right scale at which
to act in these areas.  Humanities Commons offers national scale
linked to learned societies, which themselves have proven to be good
at giving national scale to disciplinary activities.  A high quality
platform broadly accessible and committed to open access to the
materials it gathers feels like something that could gain altitude
fairly rapidly.  There’s an interesting interplay to be worked out
between what makes sense to do at this level and what remains or
becomes the work of the local digital repository.

Anyone know more about this start-up?

Jim O’Donnell
ASU