OUP, Mellon Shelve Project to Digitize Monographs
-- Library Journal, 1/24/2005
The Oxford University Press-led Project TORCH (The Online Resource Center in the Humanities), a collaborative project to make collections of backlist scholarly monographs in the humanities available in electronic format, has been discontinued. Citing the recent Google plan to digitize books from libraries, OUP and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "agreed" to shelve the project, though it was unclear whose initiative it was to close TORCH. The news had librarians wondering how Google's plans might influence the behavior of other funding agencies. Mellon funded two phases of TORCH, but Don Waters, Mellon's program officer for scholarly communication, declined to comment and referred all questions to OUP officials.
