IN PRAISE OF: THE MELLON FOUNDATION
by Marylaine Block
Sometimes I like to use this space to simply thank organizations that help librarians and archivists in our mission to preserve knowledge and increase public access to it. One of the greatest of these benefactors is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
<http://www.mellon.org/>.
Consider how often the words "supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation" appear in news releases announcing new programs in preservation and digitization. In 1994, for instance, Research Libraries Group [RLG] announced that it had received an unrestricted grant of $600,000 from its long-time supporter, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to improve its operating infrastructure and broaden its services.
In 2002 the Council on Library and Information Resources announced that it would join with Dartmouth College Library to develop a Scholarly Communication Institute with a new grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 2003, Indiana University and the University of Michigan announced an $875,000 Mellon grant to create the Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive project, an online archive of video recordings capturing not just ethnic music but the cultural practices surrounding it -- the costumes, ritual practices and dance "that are integral to fully understanding musical expression."
Just this week, Cornell University Library announced that it is developing an open source publication management system known as DPubS to provide authors and publishers with a more affordable way to publish scholarly research on the Web, funded in part by a $670,000 grant from Mellon.
Many librarians and scholars may already be aware that they are benefiting from Mellon funding every time they use J-STOR (an independent not-for-profit archive of important scholarly journals), ArtSTOR (a project to develop, “store,” and distribute electronically digital images and related scholarly materials for the study of art, architecture, and other fields in the humanities), and the Making of America project at the University of Michigan and Cornell (a full-text database of historic popular journal and monograph content from American publishers from 1800-1925). But they may not fully grasp the breadth and depth of Mellon's funding efforts. The foundation supports a variety of activities:
MAJOR DIGITIZATION PROJECTS
The Mellon Foundation has been an eager partner in efforts to preserve cultural history and make it accessible to scholars around the world. The Digital Imaging Project of South Africa, including anti-apartheid periodicals published between 1960 and 1994, is just one of the many digitization projects the Mellon Foundation has funded. Others include the HistoryE-book project of the American Council of Learned Societies, which aims to provide electronic access to the back catalogue of US scholarly presses <http://www.historyebook.org/>,
the Hannah Arendt Papers collection at the Library of Congress<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html>, and the Latin American Microfilm Project (LAMP)<http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/index.htm> to digitize executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil's national government during the period between 1821 and 1993, and by its provincial governments from the earliest available for each province to the end of the Empire to 1889.
RESEARCH ON BEST PRACTICES
The Mellon Foundation doesn't give away money on any old thing that sounds good; they want evidence that projects will have the desired effect of increasing scholarly communication and access to unique library holdings, and evidence that the projects they fund can become self-supporting. Consequently they have funded numerous research studies on system architecture, pricing models, and user expectations and satisfaction. Among them are the National Academy Press's Evaluation Study of E-Publishing Initiatives, the University of Hertfordshire's "Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage, and the Online Books Evaluation Project at Columbia University.
BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE: STANDARDS FOR PRESERVATION, COLLABORATION AND ACCESS
Mellon has been a strong supporter of interoperability for digital resources, and has supported numerous projects that use Open Archive Initiative standards and Dublin Core metadata to harvest research-worthy data. One of the finest results of their support is OAIster <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/>, "a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services... to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone." Another Mellon-funded project, "Building an American Studies Information Community" plans to create an infrastructure for knowledge exchange among American studies scholars by digitizing resources and harvesting metadata from other collections.
OTHER PRESERVATION ACTIVITIES
Mellon has also funded a variety of initiatives to preserve fragile and unique historical documents. The National Library of Wales, for example, received funding for a co-operative Microfilming Project <http://www.wales.gov.uk/subiculture/content/recordedpast/forp-c-e.htm>, and The Canadian Cooperative Preservation Project, established in the 1990s, allowed five Canadian university libraries, plus the National Library, to develop a national preservation program which resulted in national Guidelines for Preservation Microfilming in Canadian Libraries and the establishment of a Canadian Register of Microform Masters. The British Library, Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Cambridge used a Mellon grant for a major project of preservation microfilming of endangered materials (primarily brittle paper) of national and scholarly importance; the project also established national standards for preservation filming.
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
Cornell University Library's Project Euclid <http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Home> is just one beneficiary of Mellon's interest in improving the infrastructure for scholarly communication. The project is designed to provide independent mathematics and statistics journals with a toolkit "to streamline their editorial and peer review processes and publish their issues in a timely and cost-effective manner."
CONFERENCES
Mellon has provided support for a variety of conferences dealing with digitization, collaboration, and information literacy, including the 2002 Conference on Union Catalogs at the national Library of Estonia 2002, which discussed methods for designing and implementing union catalogs and shared cataloging systems. Another beneficiary was the Pacific Northwest Information Literacy Institute at Whitman College in 2003.
INTER-LIBRARY COOPERATION
When libraries that already have strong collections in a subject wish to multiply that strength by collaborating with other libraries, they're good candidates for Mellon support. Mellon provided funding the Berkeley-Stanford Cooperative Program in Latin-American Collection Development which allows the
two library systems to share an on-line Catalog Data File, regularly exchange and update serials records on microfiche, and extend direct borrowing privileges to faculty and graduate students at both universities.
TRAINING
Mellon has assisted in university information literacy programs and programs like the South African National Cultural Heritage Training and Technology project, "designed to overcome the legacy of Apartheid by strengthening South African civil society and training a new multicultural generation of cultural workers."
DIRECT SUPPORT OF LIBRARIES AND OTHER CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS
The Foundation created a $50 million fund to assist New York City museums, libraries, performing arts organizations, and public parks that were directly affected by the events of September 11, 2001.
When the definitive histories of scholarly communication and digital preservation are written, entire chapters will have to be devoted to the essential enabling role of the Mellon Foundation.
It's no accident that the Mellon Foundation has such a significant impact. Providing seed money for promising new endeavors is part of its stated mission.
It says, "The primary objective of the Foundation’s interest in scholarly communications is to promote the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined. Within the scholarly communications program, grantmaking occurs principally in these four main categories: new methods of creating scholarly resources, innovations in scholarly publication, cataloging and other forms of intellectual access, and preservation." <http://www.mellon.org/programs/highered/libraries/libraries.htm>
Some of us are the grateful recipients of the Mellon money that enables us to carry out our biggest dreams of spreading our unique knowledge far and wide.
But all of us -- researchers, students, librarians, journalists, and ordinary, curious people -- are beneficiaries of the extraordinary result of humanity's pooled resources. And on behalf of all of us, I'd like to say, "Thank you."
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COOL QUOTE:
I know that your education, the tools you have available, and most of all, your determination and enthusiasm constitute a formidable counter-force to the walls that are being built around creativity and discourse. I count on you to get out there and create. You can – you MUST -- innovate faster than your ability to innovate can be enclosed by laws, regulations, and technological fences.
Smart Mobs: to the class of 2004: Commencement address by Howard Rheingold. http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/003327.html
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