Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

A major foundation turned to Winthrop to help capture insights into its grant-making programs.

In 1999, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made the first of a series of grants to support Gutenberg-e, an innovative digital publishing program designed to help young scholars develop and legitimize new modes of historical scholarship. By the time it ended in 2008, the project had yielded some breakthrough work, but it had also encountered numerous problems. Hoping to capture insights that could benefit future digital publishing initiatives, as well as its own grant-making, the Mellon Foundation engaged Winthrop to write a short history of Gutenberg-e for practitioners in the field. The result was “Sustainability and the Scholarly Enterprise: A History of Gutenberg-e,” which was published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing in April 2012.

Besides reviewing project documents, Winthrop interviewed the project stakeholders—not just the leaders, but also the editors, web designers, and technical architects charged with helping Gutenberg-e authors realize their vision of a new kind of book. Perhaps most important, we interviewed many of the authors themselves, whose successes and setbacks had until then been largely overlooked.

Winthrop, no less than Mellon, expected this to be a story about technology; it ended up to be a story about institutional responses to technology. Far from transforming the scholarly enterprise, technology instead became a means to shore up the existing system of scholarly publishing, with all its flaws intact. Yet Mellon was willing to be surprised, which let Winthrop do what it does best for the benefit of its clients: reveal unspoken assumptions, challenge conventional wisdom, see isolated events in broader contexts, and generate authoritative insights.