H-Mac

Dear H-Net Readers:

As our fall appeal comes to a close, all of us at H-Net wish to express our heartfelt thanks to the many readers who have contributed during the past few weeks.  Your gifts go directly to our program services, helping us to staff our help desk, make improvements to our web resources, and develop new features that leverage the tremendous talent pool of our hundreds of volunteer editors.

During this year’s fundraising campaign, you have heard from editors and leaders at H-Net about existing and new services that the H-Net Commons makes possible: our new Book Channel, the

The Ghost of H-Net Past

When H-Net began in 1994, email was a rarity, the internet was a collection of text-based gopher files that you could access if you knew the right commands, and scholars in small departments or isolated areas never had the chance to talk with someone else in their field. Into these dark times, H-Net editors took on the challenge to teach their colleagues how to use email. Editors promoted discussions of which archives were the most useful for which subjects. H-Announce soon started to replace physical paper flyers to announce conferences. Isolated scholars learned about

Dear H-Net Readers and Subscribers:

I am Robert Cassanello, Vice President of Research and Publications at H-Net, and I wanted to ask you if you have not already done so to consider donating to H-Net during this campaign drive. I first heard about H-Net back in 1994 during a graduate seminar and immediately joined a couple of burgeoning networks. Throughout this 20+ year relationship with H-Net, I have been fortunate enough to have gained a tremendous amount of professional contacts, development, as well as academic dialog that was unimaginable while I was an undergraduate student in history.

As

Dear H-Net subscribers and readers,

H-Net is uniquely poised in the online academic world in a way that other sites and outlets simply can't match. It isn't just H-Net's new publishing platform that makes that the case. In the past two years 280 new editors have joined H-Net. That's 280 scholars, researchers,
and teachers who have seen the potential of the H-Net Commons, gotten involved to help develop it, and are providing service to their fields by building resources and developing meaningful content with and for their peers.

Among H-Net's 549 editors, these 280 represent an infusion of new

Dear H-Net Readers and Subscribers:

Over ten years ago, the H-Net Council passed a Strategic Plan for H-Net that envisioned what became the Commons.  H-Net would “implement an enterprise-wide content management system that encourages information sharing in a protected networked environment monitored by field experts” and “Plan for migration of content delivery technologies to web-based formats for editing, publication, and service.”

Since then we have rebuilt our Job Guide service, created a Reviews Management System for inventory, copyediting, and publishing of book reviews, and migrated our

Dear Friends of H-Net:

In the two years since we celebrated our 20th anniversary, H-Net has entered a new era, our greatest transition since we broke upon the world as a consortium of email-based discussion groups in 1993.  The H-Net Commons draws together all the main elements of H-Net’s distinctive editorial culture and content into one powerful sharing platform that is expandable, flexible, and durable.  Hewing to our core belief in scholarly moderation, the Commons gives editors and subscribers a suite of tools and features that leverage twenty years of publications: reviews, syllabi

On July 1, 2015 H-Net Executive Council voted to decommission H-Mac, effectively removing it from H-Net. In earlier correspondence with H-Net’s Vice-President for Networks, one of H-Mac’s founding editors, Kittrell Rushing, stated, “H-Mac adequately served its purpose. It can be retired with honor and fond memories.” H-Net Council has agreed. While recognizing H-Mac’s long service as one of H-Net’s oldest networks, Council also recognized the digital working environment for historians and other scholars has changed dramatically since the network’s founding in 1994. Those among H-Mac’s 699