Scholarly Communications program focuses broadly on all stages in the life cycle of scholarly resources. The program complements fellowships and other kinds of support for research and teaching at research universities, independent research centers, libraries, and museums by promoting the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined.

Grantmaking occurs principally in five main categories: new methods of creating scholarly resources, innovations in scholarly publication, cataloging and other forms of access, preservation, and research and evaluation. The Foundation is especially interested in developments that:

• Use forms of scholarly communications to stimulate collaborations among scholars and scholarly institutions in ways that substantially advance knowledge;
• Foster the means economically to sustain forms of scholarly communication; and
• Apply technology to forms of scholarly communications in order to improve quality, lower costs, speed up work, open new perspectives, or make work possible that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Research in Information Technology (RIT) is dedicated to supporting the thoughtful application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes. The Foundation is interested in promoting the study of uses of digital technologies that can be applied to research and online and distance learning and teaching. The Foundation also supports investigations of new technical approaches to the archiving of textual and multimedia materials that require improved search and storage techniques and improvements in user-interfaces. The impact of information technology (and especially digitization) on scholarship, scholarly communication, and libraries is indisputable.

The Foundation seeks proposals related to technology that benefits one or more of its constituencies and/or multiple institutions, can realistically be developed by the grantee within the proposed timeframe and budget, provides a significant cost savings, is shareable, reliable, and objectively assessible, and has available IP.

The main goal of the Foundation’s higher education program in South Africa is to develop capacity in higher education by providing opportunities for individuals who were previously disadvantaged and individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to the previously disadvantaged.

Grants from the Foundation have supported regional library collaborations of universities and technikons (now universities of technology). All 21 higher education institutions and the National Library of South Africa have benefited from our support of five regional consortia. The Foundation also made grants to the South African Bibliographic Network (SABINET) to support library collaboration at the national level and to promote access to JSTOR, a scholarly journal archive (www.jstor.org). In addition, the Foundation has worked to improve access to the Internet for all of South African higher education through the Tertiary Education Network (www.tenet.ac.za).

Penn Almanac 5/13/08 article about the Mellon grant

Press release (May 2008): "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $450,000 to the Penn Libraries to open the treasures of the Henry Charles Lea Library collection to a wider world. Mellon's generosity will open new avenues of scholarship by facilitating local and global access to the Lea Library collection, which is comprised of printed and manuscript materials documenting medieval and early modern Church history and the Inquisition."