An Appeal from H-Net: Help Us Get To The Launch Pad...

Dear Friends of H-Net:

This January I attended H-Net's wonderful 20th anniversary reunion at 
the American Historical Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, 
where I joined with so many old friends and new acquaintances to 
celebrate two decades of free service to the profession.  There I 
previewed a prototype of our exciting new web platform, informally 
dubbed "H-Net 2.0."  Our editors have been testing a development version 
and our staff has been earnestly wringing out bugs and kinks in the new 
system.  I am especially pleased that this new platform will not only be 
more interactive for subscribers, but it will also focus even more on 
shared scholarly content.  You can look at a recent version of the 
platform at its permanent home

http://networks.h-net.org

where our friends at H-South have been adding material and trying out 
features.  The site is not taking subscribers at the moment, but it’ll 
give you some of the flavor of the new system.  You can read about our 
efforts at
http://networks.h-net.org/node/513/pages/875/greetings-visitors

Moving over to this platform will be a huge task for our staff!  Your 
donations will help us get to the starting gate.  We are *purchasing new 
equipment* to handle the resource load as networks and their subscribers 
join up, and we are *writing instructions, help pages, and webinar 
scripts* to help editors and subscribers make the most of what this 
system has to offer.  Finally, we are working under the hood to *tighten 
up features, improve navigation and design elements, and speed up the 
system’s response times.*

All of these things require staff and money.  *Your tax-deductible 
donation will help us keep H-Net free to the public, meet the cost of 
finishing the work, and shorten the transition time to launch* -- please 
visit:

http://www.h-net.org/donations

Thank you for supporting H-Net!

Melanie Shell-Weiss, Ph.D.
President, H-Net

Director, Kutsche Office of Local History
Assistant Professor, Liberal Studies Department
Grand Valley State University
101 Lake Ontario Hall
Allendale, Michigan 49401
Email: [email protected]

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