With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association is in the midst of creating the Humanities Commons, a federated open-source network of sites that will link the MLA to other humanities societies to further interdisciplinary collaboration. During this pilot phase of the project, the MLA is establishing and connecting Commons networks for three partners, the College Art Association; the Association for Jewish Studies; and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and building a central hub for members of these societies to work together.
A key element of this project will be the expansion of the scholarly association's beta repository, CORE, which facilitates the open-access distribution, discussion, and citation of the many products of humanities research, including online exhibitions, conference presentations, data sets, and learning objects such as syllabi and slide decks. A truly social repository, CORE currently connects with the MLA's special interest forums, enabling members to share their deposited work directly with the people likely to be most interested in reading and discussing it. This connection has resulted in enhanced discoverability that has been crucial in encouraging uptake and continued use of the repository.
CORE will expanded across the network of Humanities Commons spokes, opening up opportunities for participation in scholarly communication regardless of discipline or institution. A robust tagging system will allow any visitor to the Humanities Commons to discover scholarship that transcends or lives between disciplines, while benefitting the members of the scholarly societies by increasing the discoverability and impact of the objects of their humanities research.
In May 2016, CORE will be a year old, while Humanities Commons will have six months remaining in its grant period. In this HASTAC paper, the CORE and Humanities Commons project manager will discuss what the MLA team has learned from the successes, failures, and challenges encountered along the path to building an interdisciplinary commons.
