The last issue of the electronic newsletter "The History Journals News"
contains an article about JSTOR. Perhaps it is of interest for the
subscribers of SERIALST.
Stefan Blaschke.
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THE HISTORY JOURNALS NEWS
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Issue #22-00 September 6, 2000
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Editor: Stefan Blaschke
E-Mail: hjn@history-journals.de
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ISSN 1439-8044
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URL: http://www.history-journals.de/
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-----Table of Contents-----
~ Editorial
~ Article
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-----Editorial-----
Historians can read old articles as literature or as source. The access to
old journals can be a problem. For example, libraries did not subscribe to
all journals, single volumes are lost or damaged. A digital library for
periodicals could be a solution. The article by Dawn Tomassi, Assistant
Director for International Library Relations, deals with such an
electronic database: JSTOR, and its goal, development and use.
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-----Article-----
"JSTOR: ARCHIVING AND ACCESSING THE PAST"
by Dawn Tomassi
[1] "The greatest literary historian must of necessity be a master of
the science of history, a man who has at his fingertips all the
accumulated facts from the treasure houses of the dead past. But he must
also possess the power to marshal what is dead so that before our eyes it
lives again."
[2] Theodore Roosevelt made that remark in an address to the American
Historical Association in 1912 when he served as the organization's
president. If he were alive today, Roosevelt might benefit from JSTOR, a
not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a
trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide and extend
access to these journals to the entire academic community. Today, JSTOR's
Arts & Sciences I Collection contains 15 major history journals and 102
other journals in 14 additional academic fields including Economics,
Sociology, Philosophy, Mathematics and Asian Studies. (For a list of
titles in JSTOR's Arts & Sciences I Collection, see Appendix A to this
article.) Currently, JSTOR is in the process of completing its General
Science Collection, which will contain seven titles reaching back to the
17th century and covering more than 800 journal years.
ORIGIN OF JSTOR
[3] JSTOR began as an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The
original idea arose from a simple question posed by Foundation President
William G. Bowen. As a board member at Denison University, Bowen learned
that the university library was considering building a new, 5 million US
Dollars extension because shelf space in the old library was running out.
A good part of the space in the proposed extension would be devoted to
housing older academic journals, which would make the journals even more
difficult to access for the Denison community. Would it be possible, Bowen
wondered, to convert the back issues of journals to electronic format as a
way to save space, control budgets and at the same time increase access to
valuable journal literature?
[4] In 1994, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, a pilot project
was initiated at five colleges and universities with ten core academic
journals, five in history and five in economics. (The original test site
libraries were: Bryn Mawr College, Swarthmore College, Haverford College,
Denison University, Williams College in addition to the University of
Michigan.) For the first time, scholars and students would have the
opportunity to access the complete archives of selected academic journals
via the Internet.
[5] JSTOR's goal is to become a central archive for the scholarly
community by providing scholars with access to the complete back-runs of
journals. Currently, the journals in the JSTOR database extend as far back
as 1865. By December 31, 2000, when JSTOR's General Science Collection is
completed, JSTOR will contain journal titles from as far back as the 1600s
(The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which
began publication in 1665). A "moving wall" of content will ensure that
JSTOR's archival collections are up-to-date. (A "moving wall" is a fixed
period of time ranging, in most cases, from two to five years, that
defines the gap between the most recently published issue and the date of
the most recent issues available in JSTOR). In addition, unlike many other
resources that offer journal indices, abstracts or text-only version of
articles, JSTOR makes available complete articles which appear on screen
as they were first designed, illustrated and published in the paper
version.
[6] The University of Michigan was tapped to develop the software and to
purchase the hardware necessary to allow bitmapped images of journal
literature to be accessed over computer networks. The complexities of this
project became clear almost immediately. To begin with, JSTOR discovered
that many established journals lacked accurate records of their own
publication runs. For example, over the years, some journals have
published supplementary issues and others have skipped issues. At times,
it was difficult to assemble a complete collection of journals: issues or
articles were missing from bound volumes or pages were marked or damaged,
making them unusable for scanning. Assembling and checking the "raw
material" -- in this case, the paper journals -- has been a
labor-intensive effort that has necessitated quite a bit of detective work
in some cases. An unanticipated contribution of JSTOR has been to provide,
for the first time in some instances, a complete publication record for
particular journals, with an accurate index of all articles, reviews, and
other materials they contain.
[7] In December of 1994, the University of Michigan team began scanning
750,000 pages of journal literature at high resolution, 600 dots-per-inch
(DPI). Bitmapped images of every published page are linked to a text file
generated with optical character recognition (OCR) software which, along
with metadata, allows for complete search and retrieval of the published
material. At 600 DPI, the images of the articles and illustrations,
including the most complicated figures and equations, are of true archival
quality. The software allows users to perform full-text searches on the
database as well as searches by abstract, author, and article title.
ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS REACT POSITIVELY TO JSTOR
[8] At the beginning of the project, JSTOR faced many questions from
publishers, many of whom were struggling to understand the impact of
electronic technologies on their own businesses. But by increasing access
to journal archives, JSTOR has also produced some unanticipated benefits
for them. Many publishers have neither the technical nor the financial
capability to create their own electronic archives. By creating an archive
of journals, JSTOR helps build a base of past issues to which publishers
may link current content. By linking old and new issues, many publishers
are, for the first time, able to offer a full electronic run of their
journal. There are now 117 publishers participating in JSTOR. A total of
200 journals are involved in the project, and 124 are already available
online; that number will increase as JSTOR begins to develop additional
collections.
[9] Publishers are also finding creative ways to use past issues once
JSTOR has digitized them. For example, the American Historical Society is
collecting 80 society addresses from past Society presidents for its Web
site. This includes speeches by former U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson and eminent historians such as Charles Beard. Thirty of
these addresses, already scanned and digitized by JSTOR, will be converted
into HTML for the project.
[10] To give another example, the Ohio State University Press decided to
celebrate the Journal of Higher Education's 70th anniversary by publishing
a retrospective issue of its first ten years. The special issue included
36 articles digitized by JSTOR, and covered everything from a review of a
new book by John Dewey to a 1936 announcement that students at Yale
University would be allowed to keep cars on campus.
GROWTH AND EXPANSION
[11] JSTOR improves access to journals in a number of important ways.
For example, JSTOR was designed to be used with standard PC equipment and
printers. As a result, students and researchers can access the database
from their homes or offices at any time of the day or night. In addition,
faculty and students will no longer have to search through stacks seeking
journal articles that very often are lost, damaged, or missing, or being
used by someone else.
[12] JSTOR has expanded significantly from its ten initial library test
sites. Today, 815 libraries participate in JSTOR: 650 in the U.S. and 165
in 38 countries around the world. Most are college and university
libraries. (JSTOR uses the Carnegie Classes of U.S. Institutions of Higher
Education to place colleges and universities into one of five classes
ranging from Very Large to Very Small. For a description of our
methodology, see <http://www.jstor.org/about/class.html>.)
[13] Other research-oriented institutions that have signed agreements
with JSTOR include the New York Public Library, the San Francisco Public
Library, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Library of Congress,
the IMF/World Bank and Bank of Indonesia.
[14] JSTOR has experienced dramatic geographic expansion as well. Six
Canadian colleges and universities have been a part of the JSTOR project
since the very beginning as charter participants. In March 1998, JSTOR
launched its only mirror site of the database at the University of
Manchester in England. The goal of the new site was to provide JSTOR
access to the academic community in the United Kingdom through a
collaboration with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), an
organization that funds a wide range of national services to benefit
higher education and research institutions in England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland. For this reason, JSTOR has its largest international
presence in the UK, where 42 institutions provide access to the database
to their academic communities.
[15] In addition to Canada and the U.K., JSTOR's 165 international
participants are located in countries as diverse as Lebanon, Mexico,
Nicaragua, China, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand. The
list of international sites is growing rapidly. JSTOR has experienced
increasing interest from institutions around the world, particularly over
the last year. (For a complete list of participating sites, go to
<http://www.jstor.org/about/>.)
[16] JSTOR's rapid expansion has been due in large part to excellent
word-of-mouth within the international academic community. Students and
faculty alike have been eager to obtain faster and easier access to past
issues of leading academic journals. For many scholars, JSTOR is opening
up new avenues of research.
[17] To give just a few examples, Juliana Mulroy, a professor of biology
at Denison University (one of the original pilot sites) has used JSTOR to
research cross-disciplinary views about the Dust Bowl that were a
pre-cursor to the current debate over global warming. At Villanova
University in Pennsylvania, the Reverend Joseph G. Ryan, an assistant
professor of history, has been using JSTOR to research conflicting views
about the canonization of Father Junipero Serra, who in the 1700s founded
Catholic missions in what is now California.
[18] At Yale University Law School, Fred R. Shapiro, a law librarian and
lecturer in legal research is using JSTOR to uncover new origins of words
and terms. The phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics," for example, was
first thought to have appeared in Mark Twain's autobiography, which was
published posthumously in 1924. In fact, Shapiro discovered, that phrase
was first used in an 1896 statistics journal. Shapiro has also found that
the term "multicultural" so popular in the 1980s and 1990s, was used as
early as the 1930s. Shapiro's research is being used in new editions of
the Oxford English Dictionary and the Yale Dictionary of Quotations.
JSTOR ADDS NEW GENERAL SCIENCE COLLECTION
[19] Along with the addition of new library sites, JSTOR continues to
add new journal content to the database. In February 2000, JSTOR released
the first 323,744 pages of its General Science Collection. The Collection
will contain approximately 1.4 million pages of scientific journal
literature. Included among the treasures of scientific history will be Sir
Isaac Newton's first published papers.
[20] The seven titles in this collection, which will be completed by
December 31, 2000, are: The Royal Society of London titles: Philosophical
Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (from 1665
to the moving wall, 5 years from the present); Philosophical Transactions:
Biological Sciences (from 1665 to the moving wall, 5 years from the
present); Proceedings: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
(from 1800 to the moving wall, 5 years from the present); Proceedings:
Biological Sciences (from 1800 to the moving wall, 5 years from the
present) plus Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1915
to the moving wall, 2 years from the present); Science (from 1880 to the
moving wall, 5 years from the present); and Scientific Monthly (from 1915
to1957).
ASSESSING THE VALUE OF JSTOR: A PRELIMINARY STUDY
[21] JSTOR provides a remarkable opportunity to examine the use, value
and impact of making journal literature available online. To give just one
example, JSTOR offers libraries and publishers a web statistics reporting
system so that usage can be tracked. With JSTOR available at some
institutions for as long as three years, JSTOR has begun to accumulate
enough data to initiate questions about its impact on older literature.
For example: Do scholars and students make use of the older articles? Are
the materials being used more now than they were in paper format only? Can
these data provide guidance about what material should be digitized? Does
the usefulness of the older literature vary by academic discipline? These
are some of the questions that we hope JSTOR will answer over the long
run. We are only at the initial stages of analysis, and for many of these
questions we must collect much more data for any assertions to have
statistical validity. Still, what we are finding already opens a
fascinating window into some surprising usage trends, and points to
hypotheses in five key areas.
1) The availability of older journal articles in electronic form through
JSTOR seems to have increased the use of the older articles at
participating sites.
[22] In 1996, prior to widespread availability of JSTOR, we conducted a
survey of usage of ten JSTOR journals (in their paper format) at six
colleges and universities. The mechanisms for counting uses of these paper
journals were far from perfect, but they did give us a very rough sense of
the extent of usage of these materials. Working cooperatively with
librarians at these institutions, we recorded a total of 692 uses of the
ten paper journals over a three-month period in 1996. We then counted the
number of uses in JSTOR of these same titles at the same six institutions
during the last three months of 1999. A total of 7,696 articles were
viewed and 4,885 were printed over the course of three months.
[23] Another way to address the question of whether JSTOR is increasing
use of these older materials is to evaluate the growth in usage. Judging
from conversations with librarians, it is a safe assumption that the use
of older journal articles (in paper form) was not growing prior to their
being digitized. By contrast, looking at the usage of JSTOR at the 82
sites that have had access to the resource since early 1997, one discovers
that aggregate accesses at these institutions increased by a factor of 3.4
times from 1997-1998 and 2.5 times from 1998-1999. The cumulative growth
in usage of the JSTOR database over this two-year period was an
astonishing 740%.
2) Researchers and students value the interdisciplinary nature of JSTOR.
[24] Another notable finding was that researchers are taking advantage
of JSTOR's cross-title and interdisciplinary capabilities. For example,
after sampling 68,000 searches in a single week of JSTOR use, we learned
that approximately 90% of the searches specified more than a single title.
In addition, JSTOR's ability to search across disciplinary clusters seems
important to users. Out of 58,000 recent cluster-specific searches, 69%
specified more than one cluster. As JSTOR adds new content in existing
fields, and begins digitizing journals in additional academic disciplines,
the interdisciplinary nature of JSTOR is likely to become even more
important to users.
3) Older literature remains valuable in many fields.
[25] One of the goals of the study was to take an initial snapshot of
the relative value of older literature in the academic fields included in
JSTOR. As a first estimation of this value, we looked at the top ten most
frequently used articles (in terms of the number of times that the article
has been viewed and/or printed) and noted the age of these articles.
[26] In most of the major fields included in JSTOR, the articles in the
top ten were older than one might have expected they would be. In
economics, for example, the average age of the top ten articles most
frequently printed and viewed was 13 years. More dramatically, in the
field of mathematics, the average age of the most used articles was 32
years. These data are by no means conclusive, as some of the JSTOR
journals have only been digitized relatively recently, but the early
findings seem to contradict existing assumptions about the value of older
literature.
4) Citation data alone do not reliably predict electronic usage.
[27] Judging by the most-used articles in JSTOR, citations and usage do
not correlate closely, suggesting that citations should not be used as the
sole factor in selecting journal content to be digitized. To give just one
example, the most frequently viewed article from one of the top journals
in the economics collection has rarely been cited in other articles. The
article, published in 1973, was cited only fourteen times between 1974 and
1999. Nevertheless, this article has been viewed 1,895 times and printed
1,402 times since it was made available in JSTOR, making it the 4th
most-used article in economics. (note: Economics is the most-used
collection in the JSTOR database, accounting for approximately 18% of
total accesses). One interesting question raised by these data is whether
the availability of these older articles in electronic form will increase
their citation frequency and lengthen their citation "half-life." It is
far too early to begin analyzing this question, but it is worth following.
5) The concept of "value" for research articles needs to be clearly
understood as libraries consider acquisitions and cancellation decisions
for electronic content.
[28] Increasingly, one hears that usage data should be used more
aggressively by librarians in acquisition and cancellation decisions for
current journal subscriptions. This makes perfect sense, as it relates to
one aspect of the value of the journal to the constituency of that
library. But it is important to recognize that usage is only one aspect of
the value, not the entire value. Citations and citation impact factors
reflect another kind of value.
[29] The fact that top used articles in JSTOR may be infrequently cited,
or that top-cited articles may be infrequently used, does not prove that
one or the other is more important; rather, it indicates that both
components must be considered. An article that gets assigned to a History
101 class at a large university will generate large numbers in the JSTOR
statistics, but that high usage does not necessarily reflect the
importance of the article to research and the future intellectual
development of the field. The same could be said for the value of usage
statistics in faculty tenure evaluations.
[30] Usage statistics provide important information about the value of a
journal on a campus, but they are more likely to reflect the value of the
journal as a teaching resource than as a research resource. Both
perspectives should be taken into account when using these data to help
make journal subscription decisions.
WHAT'S NEXT?
[31] There is a great deal of excitement at JSTOR as the organization
looks to the future. With the General Science Collection nearing
completion, JSTOR's Princeton University and University of Michigan
production centers are beginning to work on new collections such as
Ecology & Botany and Business & Finance. Every day, new agreements are
signed with publishers who want to participate in this collaborative
project, and with libraries worldwide seeking to make the JSTOR database
available to their communities.
For more information about JSTOR contact:
JSTOR
120 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
Phone: (212)229-3700
E-mail: <mailto:jstor-info@umich.edu>
Website: <http://www.jstor.org/>
APPENDIX A
JSTOR Arts & Science I Collection Journal Titles:
~ African American Review
~ American Historical Review
~ American Journal of International Law
~ American Journal of Mathermatics
~ American Journal of Political Science
~ American Literature
~ American Journal of Sociology
~ American Mathematical Monthly
~ American Political Science Review
~ American Quarterly
~ American Sociological Review
~ Annals of Applied Probability
~ Annals of Applied Probability
~ Annals of Mathematics
~ Annals of Probability
~ Annals of Statistics
~ Annual Review of Anthropology
~ Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
~ Annual Review of Sociology
~ Anthropology Today
~ Biometrika
~ Callaloo
~ Contemporary Sociology: a Journal of Reviews
~ Current Anthropology
~ Demography
~ Ecological Applications
~ Ecological Monographs
~ Ecology
~ Econometrica
~ Economic Journal
~ Eighteenth-Century Studies
~ ELH
~ Ethics
~ Family Planning Perspectives
~ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
~ International Family Planning Perspectives
~ International Organization
~ Journal of American History
~ Journal of Animal Ecology
~ Journal of Applied Econometrics
~ Journal of Asian Studies
~ Journal of Black Studies
~ Journal of Ecology
~ Journal of Economic History
~ Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
~ Journal of Health and Social Behavior
~ Journal of Higher Education
~ Journal of Industrial Economics
~ Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
~ Journal of Negro History
~ Journal of Philosophy
~ Journal of Symbolic Logic
~ Journal of the American Mathematical Society
~ Journal of the American Statistical Association
~ Journal of the History of Ideas
~ Journal of the RAI of Great Britain and Ireland
~ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A: Statistics in
Society
~ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B: Methodological
~ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C: Applied Statistics
~ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D: The Statistician
~ Mathematics of Computation
~ Mind
~ MLN
~ Monumenta Nipponica
~ Nineteenth-Century Literature
~ Nous
~ Pacific Affairs
~ Philosophical Perspectives
~ Philosophical Quarterly
~ Philosophical Review
~ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
~ Philosophy and Public Affairs
~ Political Science Quarterly
~ Population and Development Review
~ Population Index
~ Population Studies
~ Population: An English Selection
~ Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society
~ Proceedings of the American Political Science Association
~ Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute
~ Public Opinion Quarterly
~ Renaissance Quarterly
~ Representations
~ Review of Economic Studies
~ Review of Economics and Statistics
~ Review of Financial Studies
~ Reviews in American History
~ Shakespeare Quarterly
~ SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics
~ SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis
~ SIAM Review
~ Social Psychology Quarterly
~ Sociology of Education
~ Speculum
~ Statistical Science
~ Studies in Family Planning
~ Studies in the Renaissance
~ The American Economic Review
~ The China Journal
~ The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
~ The Journal of Business
~ The Journal of Economic Literature
~ The Journal of Economic Perspectives
~ The Journal of Finance
~ The Journal of Military History
~ The Journal of Modern History
~ The Journal of Negro Education
~ The Journal of Political Economy
~ The Journal of Politics
~ The Journal of Southern History
~ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute/Man
~ The Quarterly Journal of Economics
~ Transactions of the American Mathematical Society
~ Transition
~ William and Mary Quarterly
~ World Politics
~ Yale French Studies
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<http://www.history-journals.de/hjg-article-002.html>
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