James Cummings has been successful in getting funding as part of a partnership that has recently been awarded one of three, $1 million USD grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission) to develop a digital editions publishing co-operative that supports an expanding collection of peer-reviewing digital scholarly works. This international project is led by Diane Jakacki at Bucknell University in the United States and also partners with Susan Brown of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. James' sub-project will involve testing and improving the software to cope with the kinds of scholarly digital editions we are making in Newcastle (some coming from our colleagues own projects) and feed into the containerisation and deployment of the software with the help of research software engineers in Newcastle's Digital Institute.

"This grant was designed to find ways to better produce, publish and preserve digital scholarly editions," says Jakacki. "Over the past decade, an increasing number of editors have sought to publish their work digitally, and some have assumed that they need to develop their own protocols, custom code sets and preservation mechanisms in order to do so. This has made sustainable institutional support for them very difficult. What this project will do is establish and disseminate protocol-driven, best practice, cooperative-based approaches to digital production and publication of these materials."

For more information on the overall project click here.