East 61st Street Building. Architectural Rendering by Charles A. Platt, FAIA

Recent advances in information technology now provide unprecedented possibilities for collecting and archiving in digital format scholarly journals, art images, research data original source materials, and catalogues that can be easily accessed by the academic community via the Internet.   In recent years, the Foundation has aimed to fully harness advances in information technology to enhance education, scholarly communication and research among institutions across the globe.

Starting in 1994, the Foundation began to dedicate a significant portion of its grantmaking funds to help create organizations and infrastructure to digitally store, preserve and make available a wide range of scholarly journals, art images and related materials.  The Foundation’s objective has been to provide worldwide access to a vast array of scholarly resources that would otherwise not exist or would be available only on a very limited basis.

In pursuit of this mission and as a result of the vision of William G. Bowen (the Foundation’s president from 1988 to 2006), over the last few years the Foundation initiated several projects to take advantage of emerging technologies to meet the needs of scholarly institutions worldwide:

• JSTOR, whose goal is to serve the scholarly community by building, making available, and preserving a reliable and comprehensive electronic archive of important scholarly journal literature.
  
  
• ARTstor, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields, with a repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data and the tools to actively use those images.
  
  
• Ithaka, which is dedicated to helping accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technology for the benefit of the worldwide higher education community, including by incubating promising new projects and entities. Three initiatives are currently at different stages of planning and development:
  
  
  • NITLE
  • Aluka
  • Portico

From their inception, these incubated entities were intended to be a collaborative effort by the Foundation, the respective incubated entities and participating colleges, universities, libraries, museums and other institutions, so that all parties could benefit from shared expertise and resources, the linking of scholarly content and the economies of scale.

Together, the Foundation and the incubated entities have helped strengthen the basic information technology infrastructure so important to higher education today, and have been instrumental in developing standard applications and tools to greatly facilitate the preservation and sharing of important scholarly material that otherwise might not exist or be available only on a very limited basis.

These incubated entities have become independent not-for-profit organizations with interests closely aligned to Mellon’s.