Category Archives: oa.mellon_foundation

Senior Program Associate in the Public Knowledge program.

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“The Mellon Foundation (“Foundation”) is a not-for-profit, grant making organization that believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there.  Through its grants, the Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.  The Foundation makes grants in four core program areas—Higher Learning, Public Knowledge, Arts and Culture, and Humanities in Place—and through its signature Presidential Initiatives.

 

The Foundation seeks a Senior Program Associate in the Public Knowledge program….”

Public Knowledge Grant Programs | Mellon Foundation

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“Mellon’s Public Knowledge program supports the creation and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record—vast and ever-expanding—that documents society’s complex, intertwined humanity. The program works with archives, presses, and a range of university, public, and other local, national, and global libraries that are foundational to knowledge production and distribution in culture and the humanities. The program’s goal is to increase equitable access to deep knowledge that helps to build an informed, heterogeneous, and civically engaged society. We aspire to cultivate networks and maintainable infrastructure, expand digital inclusion, and ensure that more authentic, reflective, and nuanced stories are revealed, preserved, and told.”

Mellon Foundation Funds Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices • CLIR

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“The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been granted a $5,000,000 award from the Mellon Foundation to bolster the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices regranting program and related operations.

This highly anticipated renewal continues the decisive shift in thematic focus, with a strong emphasis on collections of historically marginalized individuals, and aims to amplify voices, work, experiences, and perspectives that have been insufficiently recognized or unattended. Since its establishment in 2015, Digitizing Hidden Collections has made a significant impact by distributing over $28 million to digitally capture and share rare and unique content in cultural memory institutions.

The forthcoming call, Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices, is set to create a groundbreaking opportunity for eligible nonprofit organizations in the US and Canada to digitize materials in any format. By providing essential funding to a diverse cohort of academic, independent, and community-based organizations, CLIR seeks to unlock access to previously unavailable or underutilized collections. This move is expected to foster broader recognition of the immense value in preserving resources that document the history of marginalized people to the advancement of social justice….”

Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub) | Internet Archive Blogs

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“We are excited to announce the public availability of ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new research and education service that helps users easily build, access, and analyze digital collections computationally at scale. ARCH represents a combination of the Internet Archive’s experience supporting computational research for more than a decade by providing large-scale data to researchers and dataset-oriented service integrations like ARS (Archive-it Research Services) and a collaboration with the Archives Unleashed project of the University of Waterloo and York University. Development of ARCH was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

ARCH helps users easily conduct and support computational research with digital collections at scale – e.g., text and data mining, data science, digital scholarship, machine learning, and more. Users can build custom research collections relevant to a wide range of subjects, generate and access research-ready datasets from collections, and analyze those datasets. In line with best practices in reproducibility, ARCH supports open publication and preservation of user-generated datasets. ARCH is currently optimized for working with tens of thousands of web archive collections, covering a broad range of subjects, events, and timeframes, and the platform is actively expanding to include digitized text and image collections. ARCH also works with various portions of the overall Wayback Machine global web archive totaling 50+ PB going back to 1996, representing an extensive archive of contemporary history and communication….”

IOI receives $1M from the Mellon Foundation to scale the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) | APR 7, 2023

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“CS&S is proud to cross-post the announcement that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD 1 million from the Mellon Foundation to catalyze investment in and adoption of open infrastructure in research. This grant will support the further development and productization of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) and the testing of critical models and strategies to widen the pool of investors in open infrastructure….”

IOI receives $1M from the Mellon Foundation to scale the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) | Apr 4, 2023

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“Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD 1 million from the Mellon Foundation to catalyze investment in and adoption of open infrastructure in research. IOI is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society. This grant will support the further development and productization of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) and the testing of critical models and strategies to widen the pool of investors in open infrastructure. COIs is designed as a resource for funders, users, and other interested stakeholders looking to make informed decisions about the open infrastructure services for research and scholarship. … With this grant, we will be able to further develop the utility, usability, and value of COIs into a fully functional web application … In addition, the grant will support our exploration of strategies to engage for-profit and non-profit companies serving the scholarly communications and research sector in reinvesting revenue derived from open knowledge and open research activities back into the underlying open infrastructure and services that underpin knowledge production. This targeted engagement and analysis approach to explore further diversification of funding sources is a critical next step to finding viable solutions towards creating a vibrant, viable, and sustainable ecosystem of open infrastructure services….”

HathiTrust Receives $1 Million Mellon Grant to Enhance Core Oper… | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“HathiTrust, a member-based organization hosted by the University of Michigan, has received a 5-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund a multi-year effort to strengthen its preservation and access mission. 

The funding will initially finance three new positions to develop an integrated program of assessment, analytics, and portfolio management for the HathiTrust organization.  “With these new capabilities in place, we can better match our resources to high impact work,” says Mike Furlough, Executive Director. “We will be able to grow our team and modernize our tools and processes, and create a more nimble and disciplined organization to meet our community’s strategic needs.”

In March 2020, HathiTrust developed the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS), permitting access to digitized materials for hundreds of academic and research libraries and their communities during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. “Emergency services increased demand for access, and confirmed the importance of large scale digitization and long-term digital preservation. From that experience, we learned that over the next several years we need to diversify the ways that libraries and users engage with HathiTrust. I’m grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s support, which will allow us to better respond to those needs,”  Furlough says….”

 

Library Futures | The Mellon Foundation grants $1 million to support libraries in the digital age

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“We are thrilled to announce that the Mellon Foundation has awarded the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law a two year, $1 million grant to support Library Futures. This grant is in service of our specialized mission that focuses on identifying, addressing, and tackling issues at the cutting edge of libraries and technology….”

Project LEND – UC Libraries

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“In January 2023, the University of California libraries launched a landmark research project – Project LEND (Library Expansion of Networked Delivery) – to investigate the potential for expanded lawful use of digitized books held by academic and research libraries. The project seeks to analyze all aspects of a digital access program — including user needs, legal frameworks, technical requirements, and collection scope — in designing an expanded service or set of services for UC faculty, staff, and students.”

UC Libraries-research-expanding-use-digitized-books | UC Davis

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“The University of California libraries — which comprise the largest university research library in the world — are launching a landmark research project to investigate the potential for expanded lawful use of digitized books held by academic and research libraries.

The Mellon Foundation is providing $1.1 million support for Project LEND (Library Expansion of Networked Delivery), a two-year project that the UC Davis Library will lead on behalf of the 10-campus UC system….

The project’s broad investigation aims to extend and strengthen the historical role of academic libraries in making information as broadly accessible as possible for use in research and education. Project teams will:

use focus groups and other methods to understand the needs of UC faculty and students for a range of research, education and clinical care scenarios
evaluate the legal frameworks under which libraries could provide expanded access to digitized books, including those still in copyright
review and analyze existing technology platforms and systems for sharing and interacting with digital books, and explore the possibilities for creating new systems and services
determine the optimal composition of a digital book collection to meet user needs; what digitized collections are currently available or where more digitization efforts may be required; and how best to manage both print and digitized collections.”

 

Compiling Jim Crow laws with Digital Research Services – UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries

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“When a high school social studies teacher asked NC Research and Instructional Librarian Sarah Carrier for a comprehensive list of North Carolina’s Jim Crow laws in 2017, Carrier didn’t feel like she had the best answer: “States’ Laws on Race and Color” by Pauli Murray, published in 1951. This left out years of potential legislation — and manually searching through decades of volumes of N.C. General Statutes was no small task. But Carrier really wanted to help this teacher and others who might ask for this information in the future. 

Carrier knew an automated solution was needed, so she worked with her library colleagues in Digital Research Services to find one. Enter Amanda Henley, head of Digital Research Services, who engaged more than 30 people — including librarians, library staff, postdoctoral researcher Kimber Thomas and history professor William Sturkey — in a multi-year project using text mining and machine learning to identify racist language in legal documents. To date, they’ve discovered nearly 2,000 Jim Crow laws in North Carolina. 

“I think the collaborative nature of this project is one of the reasons why the University Libraries is a good home for it,” says Henley, principal investigator on the project. “Because of where we sit on campus, we know what other people are doing and who has different areas of expertise. We also have a broad range of expertise within the libraries. That’s what allowed us to be so successful.” 

In August 2020, the group released the project, called “On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance,” to the public. Users can search through the laws, download their text files and view all of the North Carolina statues from 1866 to 1967. 

When the Mellon Foundation heard about On the Books, they contacted Henley about expanding it and have since provided additional funding for her team to do so. For the next two years, they will identify Jim Crow Laws within two additional states and will help research and teaching fellows learn how to use these data within their own projects and schools….”

DPLA receives $850,000 in new funding from the Mellon Foundation to support the advancement of racial equity in American archives | DPLA

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“Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its effort to advance racial justice in American archives. This funding will enable DPLA to launch a digital equity project to develop community-based partners and increase partner capacity to lead this work. The three-year project will provide support for underrepresented, under-resourced archives and expand DPLA’s capacity for supporting and partnering with diverse archival projects….”

BAD Project – COKI

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“The Book Analytics Dashboard Project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable OA Book focused analytics service. This service is needed to safeguard and support diversity in the voices, perspectives, geographies, topics and languages made visible through OA Books. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Book Analytics Dashboard project is building on an earlier Mellon-funded initiative: Developing a Pilot Data Trust for OA eBook Usage (2020 – 2022). In addition to scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support, the Demonstration Project is developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure….”

Mellon Foundation awards ITHAKA $1.5 million to make JSTOR accessible to incarcerated college students – ITHAKA

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“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded ITHAKA a new $1.5 million grant to provide incarcerated college students with access to JSTOR, a digital library of journals, books, and other materials. Our aim is for every incarcerated college student in the United States to have access to JSTOR, along with the research skills to use this and other digital resources.

One of the most significant educational challenges that incarcerated college students face is easy, reliable access to high-quality library resources to support their learning. Prisons often do not provide internet access to individuals or offer only limited access to digital resources, sometimes at high cost. This challenge has only grown in the last 12 to 18 months as the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up the need for digital learning solutions and higher education became more accessible to incarcerated individuals through financial aid expansions, including Second Chance Pell….”

Humanities Commons Receives $971,000 Mellon Grant to Support Its Expansion – College of Arts & Letters

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“Humanities Commons, which is hosted and sustained by Michigan State University and led by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities for MSU’s College of Arts & Letters, was awarded a $971,000, 5-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a multi-year restructuring of its business model.

An online open-source platform, Humanities Commons facilitates communication and collaboration among scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world. It enables users to engage in discussions across humanities disciplines and to share articles, presentations, and other scholarly materials with their peers and the public. Members also create online professional profiles to help connect with others and to share their work more broadly. …”