The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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 along the way. Hoping to capture insights that could benefit future digital publishing initiatives, as well as its own grant-making, the Mellon Foundation engaged Winthrop’s John Seaman and Margaret (Meg) Graham to study Gutenberg-e. 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 studying project documents, John and Meg 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, they interviewed many of the authors themselves, whose successes and setbacks had until then been largely overlooked.
 
For John and Meg, the project held numerous surprises. They expected Gutenberg-e to be a story about technology, it ended up to be a story about institutional responses to technology. Indeed far from transforming the scholarly enterprise, technology became a means to shore up the existing system of scholarly publishing, with all its flaws intact.
 
Not only was Mellon willing to share the story of Gutenberg-e, warts and all, for the benefit of scholars and practitioners, but also it was careful not to influence Winthrop’s conclusions. With this degree of freedom, John and Meg demonstrated the best of what Winthrop can do in the interests of its clients: reveal unspoken assumptions, challenge conventional wisdom, see isolated events in broader contexts, and generate authoritative insights.