JSTOR: A History

Citation

MacDonald, R. (2004), "JSTOR: A History", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 84-85. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470410520203

JSTOR began in November 1993 as a scheme of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation trustee (now president) William G. Bowen to help libraries save shelving costs by providing ready access to digitally “miniaturised” backfiles of scholarly journals. After ten years, there are now over 1,800 institutions accessing its collections – unique for their retrospective nature and curatorial approach. Roger C. Schonfeld, a research associate at the Mellon Foundation, was tasked with writing a “warts and all” history of the project. He has succeeded admirably in unravelling the tangled interactions of new technologies, user needs, legal questions, and business models involved in bringing to life a project that is not only a digital archive, but also an independent non‐profit organisation, and an important scholarly resource.

JSTOR: A History addresses all of these aspects of JSTOR. For instance, those contemplating digital archiving will find lessons in flexibility. The initial idea was to distribute digitised backfiles on CD‐ROM, but in a magnificent piece of serendipity, the first Internet browsers were becoming available, and it was realised that here was a really efficient way to make material available to libraries worldwide. Furthermore, as a scholarly archive, it seemed best to record pages as indexed images; however, because of the cost of indexing, and to avoid infringing existing copyrights, it would be necessary to distinguish such images from those already available on microfiche by providing searchable but “invisible” full text. As it turns out, most end‐users find this combination ideal.

Schonfeld’s analysis of JSTOR’s role in scholarly communication illustrates much about the attitudes of – and interactions among – those involved. A major part of JSTOR’s success as an organisation has been its attempts to address the concerns of all parties: the archival “moving wall” arose as an attempt to address publishers’ concerns that JSTOR might become a competitor. At the same time, commercial publishers could learn much from JSTOR’s focus on developing trust among academic librarians. While JSTOR set out to save libraries money, many realise no savings resulting from reduced building or shelving costs as these are subsumed by their parent organisations; instead, many have chosen to participate simply because their users liked the easy access to its carefully curated journal collections.

Schonfeld discusses the philosophies behind JSTOR’s collection development and fee structure, and includes interesting statistics on JSTOR’s usage. The book ends with a useful epilogue detailing organisational and operational lessons, aimed at librarians, grant makers, publishers, managers of non‐profit organisations, and those contemplating establishing a digital archive. Lessons range from the need for strong, mission‐focussed management, to the value of employing champions to promote a service. Schonfeld is strong on his analysis of the managerial, economic, and scholarly aspects of JSTOR’s history, but he does not set out to provide any in‐depth analysis of the technical side of the project. Schonfeld’s scholarship makes JSTOR: A History a valuable analysis of the mistakes and successes of a digital archive and scholarly resource, while his clear writing almost makes it a page‐turner.