In December 1998, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Library of Congress a grant to support a two-year project to digitize the Hannah Arendt Papers manuscript collection. The staff of the Manuscript Division at the Library administered the project, with assistance from the National Digital Library Program (NDLP) and in cooperation with the New School University in New York City.

2015 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation study which found that only four percent of curators in US museums are black

The importance of collaboration is incorporated into Mellon’s initiative. In an added twist, the foundation required the university presses interested in the program to find a partner -- such as a research library, a museum or an organization already involved in providing digital publishing services -- before applying.

The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to work together on testing new business models for publishing digital works, or tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including

support for additional end-user scholarly communication tools such as annotation services

Recent Mellon Grants –building capabilities:◦Expand existing distribution business into publishing services platform (UNC Press)◦Portal for art & architectural history content (Yale U Press)◦Peer review for born-digital content (Stanford U Press)◦Open access digital monographs (U California Press)◦Mixed-media digital publishing platform (WVU)◦Manage Monographic Source Materials (U Michigan Press)◦Iterative Monographs Platoform(U Minnesota Press)◦Networked Monographs Infrastructure (NYU Press)

He and his colleagues are keenly interested in the ability to annotate scholarship online, he says; Mellon has made serious investments in annotation tools and the development of open annotation standards by the university community and projects like Hypothes.is, which just received a two-year, $752,000 grant from the foundation to look into digital annotation in humanities and social-science scholarship.

a major report on cyberinfrastructure, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," underwritten by Mellon and published in 2006, was used by the NEH "as a blueprint" in forming its Office of Digital Humanities, says Brett Bobley, the director of that office.

Although it defends the persistent value of the humanities, Mellon also champions the idea that they must change with the times.

including the papers of the Founding Fathers,

the foundation is widely admired for using its money and clout to reinforce the idea that, in an age of "disruption" and the veneration of science and technology, "the humanities and the arts are central to any life that one should want to live," as Mellon’s then-president, Don M. Randel, wrote in his 2012 annual report.

Programs that introduce faculty and graduate students to effective pedagogies,

humanistic engagement with the digital

Capacious and innovative curricula