• http://www.acls.org

The American Council of Learned Societies seeks to advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences and to maintain and strengthen relations among the national societies devoted to such studies. Established in 1919 as a federation of 12 learned societies, ACLS has grown since its founding to represent 69 scholarly organizations, embracing all fields of the humanities and related social sciences, and totaling approximately 300,000 scholars. As the pre-eminent private representative of humanities scholarship in the United States, the ACLS carries out its mission in a variety of programs across many fields of learning. 

The ACLS has developed and administered numerous specific programs that have served the interests of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in general, of individual scholars, and of the nation. Central to the ACLS throughout its history have been its programs of fellowships and grants to support research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. ACLS's international programs both promote the study of world areas and provide opportunities for scholars for research and scholarly exchange.

ACLS's support of humanities research naturally includes concern for the cycle of scholarly communication upon which the researcher enterprise depends. The ACLS Conference of Administrative Officers--the convocation of the executive directors of the Council's member societies--has scholarly communication and the digital promise as an established thread of its conversations. Since 1950, the ACLS has issued a major report each decade on some aspect of the scholarly communication cycle: libraries, publishing, and new information technologies. In 2004, the ACLS appointed a commission of digitally-engaged scholars and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The commission worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal. The report, entitled Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, was released December 13, 2006 in print and online versions.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), which launched in September 2002, is a digital collection of over 1,500 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twelve learned societies, nearly 90 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. HEB now adds approximately 300 books annually to the collection, as well as a carefully selected list of new XML titles that have the potential to use web-based technologies to communicate the results of scholarship in new ways. 

In 2004, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ACLS began offering Digital Innovation Fellowships to support an academic year's leave dedicated to work on a major scholarly project that takes a digital form.

Steven Wheatley is Vice President of the American Council of Learned Societies.