Research in Information Technology

Program Staff

Ira H. Fuchs, VP for Research in Information Technology
Christopher J. Mackie, Associate Program Officer

Overview

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation program in 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.

Current Programs

The Foundation’s work with JSTOR, ARTstor, and Ithaka has helped to define the following set of guidelines that we hope proposals to the RIT program will satisfy:

1. Technology that benefits one or more of the constituencies traditionally served by the Foundation.
In the RIT program, the Foundation is responding to a complex world and its emerging technologies as they relate to traditional constituencies of the Foundation, including institutions of higher education, cultural institutions, performing arts, and conservation organizations.  Institutions of higher education are encouraged to partner with for-profit vendors, including producers of instructional software companies, publishers, course management system manufacturers, and other sources of instructional technology, when such efforts are appropriate as an integral part of a larger deliverable.

2. Technology that benefits multiple institutions.
The Foundation will support development efforts that leverage resources for the benefit of multiple institutions.  Such technologies may involve the development of open source, generalized applications, and infrastructural tools of benefit to institutions traditionally served by the Foundation, but whose development on an individual campus or from a single not-for-profit organization would be prohibitively expensive or whose cost would be difficult for an individual institution to justify. Resources required for generalized solutions are often far greater than a single campus or organization would individually commit because generalized solutions must support a far greater range of possible needs.

Among its efforts to support generalized solutions, the Foundation has funded uPortal, a consolidated, personalized, intuitive gateway to information resources; OKI, an extensible framework for Learning Management Systems; OCW, free worldwide non-commercial access to the educational materials of all 2,000 courses taught at MIT; and PKI, an open-source, end-to-end, inter-institutional, public key infrastructure.  All of these projects involve technologies designed to benefit multiple institutions.

3. Technology that can realistically be developed by the grantee within the proposed timeframe and budget.
Software and technology projects are notorious for running over budget and being late.  The Foundation favors applicants with a demonstrated institutional capacity to carry out such initiatives with high quality, on time, and on budget.  The Foundation prefers not to grant extensions and seeks in particular to avoid situations in which additional support is requested to complete the effort.

Projects should clearly list and adhere to key milestones and the schedule of deliverables.  Contributions from the Foundation will usually be tied to successful completion of each milestone.  The Foundation will also look to dedicated resources, with reliance upon as few fractional FTEs as possible.

Large projects will often involve two or three phases.  A pilot phase will define the process for ramping up the larger effort, the testing of several production models and/or a prototype to minimize costs, maximize quality, and establish best practices.   The production phase will usually involve a transition toward steady-state operation and self-sufficiency.

4. Technology that provides a significant cost savings (including any relevant economies of scale) and/or provides a cost-effective way of meeting the specific needs of the Foundation’s constituencies (cheaper, better, or preferably both).
Rising costs continue to confront higher education.  Caught between demands for additional services and declining rates of revenue growth, colleges and universities must do more without relying upon continuing tuition hikes.  Clear institutional priorities and cost containment are part of the solution.

Technology can also be a part of the solution.  However, on many campuses, with its high fixed costs, technology has become a part of the problem.  We must use new technologies to contain costs, by working collaboratively to develop new, modular, open-source tools and approaches—and by leveraging our collective skills and expertise.

In most instances, Foundation support will facilitate solutions to common needs that result in an overall cost savings for involved institutions, as exhibited in the JSTOR model.  Apart from the value of preserving and promoting access to print publications, the Foundation was drawn early on to the economics of the JSTOR project:  facilitating easy access to digitized content might potentially free up enormous amounts of valuable library space at many research libraries and academic institutions by permitting those institutions to remove journal literature from their shelves.  The cumulative savings (measured in the high cost of new library space) could exceed the total capital investment.

Without Foundation support, institutions might individually require a very long time to introduce information technology solutions.  Many institutions and individuals simultaneously attempt to solve the same set of problems.  By joining forces, a collaborative effort can leverage skills and software developers across institutions of higher education, and yield cost effective solutions and/or a significant cost savings to the benefit of all.

For example, academic institutions have struggled with implementing their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications.  There are concerns about the viability of ERP vendors and the compatibility of higher education culture and ERP business models.  Institutions have encountered much higher costs than expected, and many have experienced lower, rather than enhanced functionality.  Moreover, few smaller institutions can afford an ERP solution.

A collaborative approach for sharing applications could substantially decrease the individual cost of ownership, offer enhanced functionality to the whole community, and offer a much more affordable and appropriate support structure.

5. Compelling, demonstrable technology for which funding is required to create fully shareable versions, expanded features, or improved reliability.
The Foundation favors development projects that build upon existing, well–established, and reliable tools and efforts.  In the world of venture capital, this is referred to as ‘second stage’ (or ‘later’) financing.  For example, the Foundation supported the development of uPortal version 2.0.  Version 1.0 had been extensively tested and was already in production at the University of British Columbia; version 2.0 is a fully exportable version that meets the needs of a wide variety of colleges and universities.

The Foundation is looking for technologies that are already being built by an institution but which, with additional resources, could be used by many.  This criterion frequently runs against the grain of colleges and universities which often focus upon personalized instruction and services; technologists at institutions of higher learning do not usually think in terms of creating generalized solutions.  However, with Foundation support, some institutions have shown an interest in making their technology widely available to their peers.  Note that the Foundation will not, in the foreseeable future, support or pursue pure research in information technology—such efforts will be left to the National Science Foundation and other grantmaking organizations.

The Foundation favors projects that are easily shared, extensible, and reliable.  As in the case of the PKI, OKI, and uPortal projects, the Foundation prefers the development of open-source, modular applications, and open standards and specifications that are freely available and usable cost-effectively.  The aim is to allow other institutions to more easily tailor components to their infrastructures and modify such tools to their particular needs without having to confront huge, up-front software acquisition costs.

6. Technology for which intellectual property rights are available.
The Foundation favors making access to digital materials as broadly available as possible, and will therefore favor projects for which intellectual property (IP) rights are available.  Ironically, the movement toward the use of modular components, which accelerates software development and the usability of new technology, can complicate the acquisition of such rights.  Grantees must be scrupulous in identifying the source of all the IP they use under their grants and must secure the rights to third party technology, in a form that is consistent with the Foundation’s IP agreement.

7.  Technology for which there is a credible support and self-sufficiency plan.
Support infrastructures for technology in institutions of higher education are rarely financially self-sustaining and they almost never serve multiple institutions.  Indeed, support is often an after-thought in institutional technology endeavors.  Drawing upon the JSTOR model (Note *), the Foundation will favor capital investments in production models that offer clear potential for self-sufficiency of the grant effort and favor projects that investigate different production and support alternatives prior to final implementation of the production model.  The PKI and uPortal projects, for example, involve sustainable long-term support models.

8. Technology whose value can be objectively assessed.
Technology development projects undertaken by not-for-profit organizations often give assessment a low priority, when assessment is included at all.  But resources within higher education and the other constituencies served by the Foundation continue to be precious.  We aim to find cost-effective uses of technology in research and teaching by measuring, as scientifically as possible, how best to deploy existing and new technologies.  We favor the use of metrics, including user-surveys, automated data collection, and other assessment tools—not simply anecdotal evidence—to help guide future support for technology projects.

The Foundation is interested in the scalability, longevity, flexibility, and upgradability of such technologies.  What additional value will the technology bring to the Foundation’s constituencies?  In what ways will researchers, instructors, and learners be able to use the technologies effectively?  What assessment strategies and designs will be used?  How will members of the community be able to use these technologies as wisely and effectively as possible?

Program Contact Information

Please direct initial inquiries by email to:

Ira H. Fuchs

Before writing, please review the Foundation’s general requirements for grant proposals in the Grant Inquiries section of this Web site.

* The Foundation made its first grants to JSTOR in 1994 to explore the feasibility of creating and sharing a new internet-based archive of journal literature.  JSTOR is now a free-standing, not-for-profit organization with its own board and enough participating libraries to support continuing growth.

JSTOR’s financial model has participating libraries pay a one-time “Archive Capital Fee” as well as an “Annual Access Fee.”  The fees contribute towards self-sufficiency of the enterprise by covering the initial cost of the digitization, technology upgrades, adequate server capacity, maintenance of the technical infrastructure, technical support, and training for new users.