H-Net,
Addressing the Digital Divide
by Melanie Shell-Weiss, H-Net Advisory Council
Addressing
the challenges of the digital divide remains a primary focus of
H-Net's activities. The H-Net community has always seen networked
communication and online publication as a tool to access to historical
knowledge and other humanities resources. For H-Net, much of the
attraction of the Internet is its ability to bridge distance and
network a wider community of scholars, teachers, and students.
Our
current efforts to foster cross-cultural communication have focused
on a range of activities. First, H-Net's more than 140 discussion
networks enable communities with common interests - ranging from
Middle Eastern Gender Studies to Urban History to the history of
Florida - to overcome traditional barriers to debate and exchange
of scholarly information. The conversations of these networks, syllabi,
bibliographies, book and software reviews are not only distributed
to members by Listerv software, but are also made available by H-Net
through the World Wide Web. We are currently the world's largest,
free, online publisher of historical knowledge.
H-Net's
initiatives, however, extend beyond creating and maintaining the
communications infrastructure of its discussion networks. H-Net's
editors and subscribers also work to address a range of scholarly
needs and inequalities faced by the global humanities and social
science community. In much of the world, humanities scholars live
and work in societies that have not enjoyed anything like the levels
of support for their endeavors that scholars in advanced industrial
economies like the United States, Western Europe and Australia take
for granted. For many members of H-Net's Africa networks, for example,
the legacies of colonialism include poor and often highly selective
access to print-based information resources. Thus, beginning in
1996, H-Net, in partnership with Michigan State University, and
a host of Africa-based educational and cultural institutions and
NGOs, launched an extensive African Internet Connectivity Project
to address these needs. Beginning this year, H-Net is also launching
a humanities electronic publications initiative that breaks with
the increasing practice of "pay-per-view" licensing and
fees models which currently dominate the scholarly publishing world.
About
the author
Melanie
Shell-Weiss is a member of the H-Net Advisory Council, co-editor
of H-Women.
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