OUP, Mellon Douse Project TORCH

The Oxford University Press (OUP)– led Project TORCH (The Online Resource Center in the Humanities), a collaborative activity 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 (see News, LJ 1/05, p. 18ff.), OUP and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "agreed" to shelve the plan, though it was unclear whose initiative it was to extinguish TORCH.

The news had librarians wondering how Google's schemes 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.