ACLS Releases Report on What's Needed for Diverse and Sustainable Digital Humanities

Recommendations by Commission Now Available on the Manifold Platform and PDF Download to Encourage Accessibility and Action

NEW YORK, June 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has released Other Stories To Tell: Recovery Scholarship and the Infrastructure for Digital Humanities, a comprehensive study that includes a long-term agenda for work that constitutes a significant part of the humanities of the future: projects that will evolve humanistic scholarship to speak to the country's wide range of communities and student populations. 

In 2021 ACLS convened a national commission of 21 innovative scholars, archivists, and librarians to analyze current challenges and make actionable recommendations for providing sustainable access to digital resources and projects that can serve as important resources for 21st century learners.

Other Stories To Tell is the Commission's culminating report, which illuminates how digital methods can inspire students, can capture and tell a greater breadth of society's stories, and can break down barriers between higher education and the public. The report's wide-ranging recommendations lay out an agenda for productive partnerships for schools, libraries, and communities, and ways to provide wide-reaching access to new knowledge in digital form.

As colleges and universities face unprecedented challenges and seek ways to build a new era of trust and engagement with society, Other Stories to Tell provides an essential guide for long term development and inspiration for new possibilities in the near term. Issues addressed include:

• The best approaches to undertaking community-centered digital archiving that can be sustained over time;
• Changes that should be made to recognize and reward campus and community constituencies for creating these new and needed resources;
• How librarians and publishers can build digital infrastructure to bring a wealth of new sources to present and future generations;
• What academic institutions can do to work collectively rather than in isolation to enable these new research methods and collections to thrive.

The report also includes rich compilation of resources, including tools and guidelines, for scholars, practitioners, and institutional policy makers.

Other Stories to Tell is now available as a downloadable PDF, as well as on the ACLS Manifold instance, allowing project teams, administrators, and others to directly engage with this extensive resource with the platform's annotation tools as they adapt recommendations at their own campuses.

Learn more at acls.org/digitalcommission.

About the Digital Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship
The Commission was formed in November 2021 and made possible by generous funding by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Chaired by Professor Marisa Parham (University of Maryland, College Park), this assembly of leading scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and university administrators met virtually and in person to discuss questions of equitable access in the creation of, access to, and sustainability of digital resources and projects related to social and racial justice. Commissioners also worked with ACLS Vice President James Shulman and Carol Mandel, Dean Emerita of the NYU Libraries in engaging more 120 knowledgeable participants in focus groups and interviews to inform its report. The report includes a wide-ranging series of recommendations for change within the ecosystem of institutions and infrastructures in which digital resources and scholarship are created, shared, and maintained over time. 

About the American Council of Leaned Societies
Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS expands the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting our commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship.

SOURCE American Council of Learned Societies