The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation approved funding of $1.293M for the Bamboo Technology Project, following on an Planning Project funded by the Foundation that commenced in April 2008. The funded project grew out of planning contributions from scholars, librarians, and technologists at hundreds of institutions.
The grant covers an 18-month plan of work that will include the creation of scholarly Work Spaces, the design of future Corpora Space applications, and the basic platforms and collection interoperability services that will support these and additional tools in the future. UC Berkeley will lead and coordinate the project, and the work will be carried out by a consortium of universities, each of which is making a substantial investment of its own resources. The partnering universities are: Australian National University; Indiana University; Northwestern University; Tufts University; University of Chicago; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; University of Maryland; University of Oxford; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Looking forward, Project Bamboo will focus not only on creation of new technologies, but also on building a broad-based and sustainable model for collaboration as a basis for the persistence and evolution of technologies are created for the humanities.