EthicShare - Center for Bioethics, University of Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL – The University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics in partnership with the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Department of Computer Science has been awarded a $517,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to pilot "EthicShare," an online website and database for ethics scholars and students to discover and share high quality digital articles and other materials–scholarly and popular press articles, multimedia objects, pre-prints, and archival documents.

The EthicShare pilot is a continuation of an earlier planning grant awarded to the University of Minnesota by the Council of Libraries and Information Resources with funds from the Mellon Foundation. EthicShare grows out of a planning partnership with Indiana University-Bloomington, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, the University of Virginia, and Georgetown University. The pilot phase of EthicShare is bolstered by new relationships with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR), OCLC, and others.

As a partnership between the Center for Bioethics, the Department of Computer Science, and the University Libraries, EthicShare is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together a diverse but deep commitment to innovation in the areas of information discovery, new forms of scholarship, and scholarly exchange and dissemination. Wendy Pradt Lougee, University Librarian, and computer science professor John Riedl, both co-principal investigators along with Professor Kahn, are leaders in the fields of digital library development, and social networking and collaborative filtering, respectively.