I am the President of Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, recently funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation to the order of $13 millions in their program ‘Knowledge Management Resources for the Human and Social Sciences’.

The members of the Synergies consortium are the University of New Brunswick, Université de Montréal (lead institution), University of Toronto, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University. Each brings appropriate but different expertise to the project. At its first level, Synergies consists of this five-university consortium that will provide a fully accessible, searchable, decentralized and inclusive national Social Sciences and Humanities database of structured primary and secondary Social Sciences and Humanities texts. This distributed environment is technically complex to implement, and it also represents a major political and social collaboration which attests to the project’s transformative dimension for Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities research and researchers. Synergies will be a primary aggregator of research that, in providing publishing services, will allow journals editors (and other producers) to structure subscriptions and maintain revenue control. At a second level, Synergies will reach out to 16 regional partner universities who will benefit from and contribute to extend Synergies functionality. At a third level, in a producer-to-consumer relationship with university libraries and organizations such as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Synergies will make possible national accessibility. Using this relationship as a model, Synergies will be positioned to facilitate similar relationships for journals with buyer consortia around the world. (A longer description, along with information on the steering committee members and the researchers associated with the project, can be found at the Synergies website.)

The video of my remarks made at the CFI award ceremony at the University of Ottawa on 8 February 2007 is available online, as well as the presentation made about the project that day.

On 29 May 2008, I delivered a plenary lecture entitled ‘Synergies and the Changing Face of Digital Humanities in Canada’ at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria). [The full-length video of the 40’ lecture is available online.]