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Community & Junior CollegeLibrariesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjcl20

JSTOR for Community CollegeLibrariesCarol L MacAdam a ba Library Relations at JSTOR , USAb Princeton University Libraries , USAPublished online: 12 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Carol L MacAdam (2002) JSTOR for Community College Libraries,Community & Junior College Libraries, 10:3, 39-46, DOI: 10.1300/J107v10n03_05

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J107v10n03_05

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JSTOR for Community College Libraries

Carol L. MacAdam

ABSTRACT. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mis-sion to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly jour-nals, and to provide and extend access to these journals as widely aspossible throughout the academic community. JSTOR is unique in offer-ing researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images ofjournal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and il-lustrated. Today, the JSTOR archive contains the complete back-runs of169 journals and is available at more than 1,100 libraries in the U.S. and51 other countries. The JSTOR archive currently includes four separatejournal collections, with more being added on an ongoing basis.

KEYWORDS. JSTOR, databases, e-journals

INTRODUCTION

Community and junior colleges serve a particular niche segment inhigher education, one that is probably the most dynamic and diverse in allof academe. It is estimated that of the 15 million full-time equivalent ofstudents in higher education, more than 75% are part-time non-residen-tial students, and that there are over 76 million adult learners today (40%

Carol L. MacAdam is Associate Director for Library Relations at JSTOR. From1986 to 1995 she was an acquisitions librarian at Princeton University Libraries. In fall1995 she left Princeton to join Swets Subscription Services as a sales representative inNorth America. It was in July 1998 that Carol joined JSTOR. She says this is her dreamjob (E-mail: CLM@jstor.org).

Copyright Carol L. MacAdam. Used with permission.

Community & Junior College Libraries, Vol. 10(3) 2001 39

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of the U.S. population). These are the learners served by two-year col-leges and they constitute a much more constantly changing communitythan that in a four-year college or university setting. Because the missionof two-year schools is different from that of other higher education insti-tutions, community college librarians face a series of unique challengestoday and the demands upon their libraries are different. Community col-lege libraries must be prepared to support students pursuing numerousdifferent career paths and fields of study, while keeping up with new andemerging areas of scholarship. Rather than serving as an archive forscholarly material, they must evolve their collections in keeping with therapidly changing nature of the dynamic academic setting at communitycolleges and are often asked to support courses in new disciplines with noadditional funding to the library. At the same time, students and facultyexpect ready and facile access to information. With the Internet continu-ing to open up a host of new research possibilities, the librarian’s role ofguiding students as they seek to locate accurate information from reliablesources is more critical than ever before. JSTOR, a collaborative effortbetween libraries, publishers and the academic community, is respondingto these issues.

ORIGINS OF JSTOR

JSTOR began as an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.The original idea grew out of a simple question posed by FoundationPresident William G. Bowen. While he was a Board of Trustees memberat Denison University, Bowen learned that the university library was con-sidering building a new, $5 million extension because shelf space in thecurrent space was running out. A good part of the proposed extensionwould be devoted to housing older academic journals, which would makethose journals even more difficult to access for the Denison community.Bowen realized that the situation at Denison was repeated manifoldaround the country as most academic libraries struggled to house the ex-act same material and still make it available to their communities. Wouldit be possible, Bowen wondered, to convert the back issues of journals toan electronic format that could be shared by all as a way to save space,control budgets and at the same time increase access to valuable journalliterature?

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In 1994, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, a pilot project toexplore this idea was initiated at five colleges and universities with tencore academic journals, five in history and five in economics. UsingJSTOR would be the first time that students and faculty had the opportu-nity to access the complete archives of selected academic journals via theInternet. Unlike many other resources that offer journal indices, abstractsor text-only versions of articles, JSTOR makes available complete jour-nal issues which appear on screen as they were first designed, illustratedand published in the paper version.

The enthusiasm generated by the pilot project encouraged the growthand development of the enterprise and in 1995 JSTOR became an inde-pendent not-for-profit organization. The initial ten journals developedinto JSTOR’s first collection, Arts & Sciences I, which now includes 117journals in 15 academic disciplines, including History, Literature, Sociol-ogy, and African-American Studies. The JSTOR archive now containsthree additional collections with a fourth scheduled for release before theend of 2001:

• The General Science Collection offers seven major titles andreaches back as far as the mid-17th century. This collection includesthe complete archives of the oldest continuously published scien-tific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ofLondon. Sir Isaac Newton’s earliest published papers and lettersfrom Benjamin Franklin describing his experiments with electricitycan be found in this collection.

• The Ecology & Botany Collection offers 29 journals in the biologi-cal sciences. Developed in cooperation with the Ecological Societyof America, the Ecology & Botany Collection enables ecologists,conservationists and scholars in related fields to research 130 yearsof journal literature.

• Arts & Sciences II is a multi-disciplinary collection offering addi-tional and complementary titles in subject areas available throughArts & Sciences I. The collection also offers journals in new disci-plines such as Classics, Archeology, and African, Latin American,Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies. Production for this collection,which will contain 100 journals when completed in 2002, is under-way. A total of 22 completed titles are currently available.

• The Business Collection, available by the end of 2001, contains atotal of 46 titles, a combination of 20 titles that are new in JSTORand 26 titles that are already part of either the Arts & Sciences I orArts & Sciences II Collections.

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Each of the titles in all JSTOR collections is complete beginning withVolume 1, Number 1 up through a “moving wall.” The moving wall is afixed period of time ranging, in most cases, from 2 to 5 years, that definesthe gap between the most recently published issue and the date of themost recent issues available in JSTOR.

JSTOR’s TECHNOLOGY

Building the JSTOR archive has been a fascinating and often challeng-ing process. For the pilot project, staff at the University of Michigan de-veloped the software and purchased the hardware necessary to allowbitmapped images of journal literature to be accessed over computer net-works. The complexities of this project became clear almost immedi-ately. To begin with, JSTOR discovered that many established journalslacked accurate records of their own publication runs. At times, it wasdifficult to assemble a complete collection of journals; issues or articleswere missing from bound volumes or pages were marked or damaged,making them unusable for scanning. Assembling and checking the “rawmaterial”–in this case, the paper journals–continues to be a labor-inten-sive effort that has necessitated quite a bit of detective work in somecases. An unanticipated contribution of JSTOR has been to provide pub-lishers and the academic community, in some instances for the first time,with a complete publication record for particular journals and an accurateindex of all articles, reviews, and other materials they contain.

The software developed by JSTOR Technology Services allows jour-nals to be scanned at high resolution, 600 dots-per-inch (DPI). Bitmappedimages of every published page are then linked to a text file generatedwith optical character recognition (OCR) software that, along withmetadata, allows for complete search and retrieval of the published mate-rial. At 600 DPI, the images of the articles and illustrations, including themost complicated figures and equations, are of true archival quality. Thesoftware allows users to perform full-text searches on the database aswell as searches by abstract, author, and article title. Because JSTOR wasdesigned for use with standard PC equipment and printers, libraries donot need to purchase special equipment and users are able to gain accessfrom their homes and offices at any time of the day or night.

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JSTOR AT COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIBRARIES

JSTOR is being used successfully at 66 community colleges through-out the country. For these two-year institutions, where most students liveoff-campus and may work during the day, JSTOR serves the student andfaculty population in important ways.

At Raritan Valley Community College in Sommerville, New Jersey, forexample, where all the students commute and library hours are limited to 70hours per week, JSTOR provides convenient access to research materialseven after the library doors close at 9:00 pm. According to Birte Nebeker, theElectronic Resources and Web Development Librarian there, students andfaculty use JSTOR from their homes or other off-campus locations.

At Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas,JSTOR has enabled the library to supplement and build its journal collec-tions. “JSTOR fills an information ‘niche’ for people looking for informa-tion outside the usual bounds of a community college collection,” saysLibrary Facilitator Deborah Ludwig. An additional and unexpected use ofJSTOR, Ludwig says, has been as a library collection tool. In 1999, the li-brary added three print subscriptions to its collection as a result of the highusage of those journals through JSTOR. In addition, Ludwig notes,“JSTOR is providing reliable access to long runs of scholarly journals, de-spite a critical lack of storage space in the library. With JSTOR, we nowkeep our print journals only 3-5 years until electronic coverage begins.”

Jefferson Community College (part of the State University of NewYork system) has one of the highest usage rates among community col-lege participants. “Many of our professors want students to have schol-arly information. There were some curriculum areas where we didn’thave access to this kind of information, for example in history,” notesInger Curth, Bibliographic Instruction Coordinator. “JSTOR providesstudents with solid material for their assignments in these areas.”

Community college users are finding their own particular value inJSTOR. Not surprisingly, usage of the JSTOR archive at two-yearschools differs from that at four-year institutions. For example, 5 percentof the usage recorded by JSTOR at community colleges is in AfricanAmerican Studies while it is 3 percent in overall JSTOR usage. Commu-nity college users make 16 percent of their accesses in History titles whileoverall it is 12 percent. Literature titles account for 12 percent of commu-nity college usage while overall they account for 5 percent. And Econom-ics receives 3 percent of the usage at community colleges while it is 15percent overall. (Please see Chart 1 for a comparison of usage for all thedisciplines in JSTOR.)

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PARTICIPATION FEES

JSTOR’s participation fees are cost-based and value driven. In ourcontinuing efforts to maintain fee structures that are fair to all partici-pants, we use the Carnegie Classes of U.S. Institutions of Higher Educa-tion to place colleges and universities into one of five classes rangingfrom Very Large to Very Small. JSTOR has designed its fee structurebased upon these classifications with the understanding that the projectedusage of the archive corresponds to the size and mission of an institution.At JSTOR we recognize that the mission of community colleges isunique and we know that their usage of the JSTOR archive differs greatlyfrom usage at even a small four-year liberal arts college. JSTOR strives toensure that participation fees match as closely as possible the value com-munity colleges will gain from participating in JSTOR.

GROWTH AND EXPANSION

Participation in JSTOR has expanded significantly since the organiza-tion was founded. Today, more than 1,100 libraries in 52 countries partic-ipate in this collaborative endeavor with the majority of participantsbeing college and university libraries. Community college participationhas taken off since 1999. In 1997 there were three community collegesamong JSTOR’s first 200 participants. By 1999 there were 20, by 2000there were 40, and now there are 66. Usage of the archive at these col-leges has also grown: from 1999 to 2000 significant accesses to the data-base climbed from 37,000 to 155,000. Looking at usage statistics for thisyear, we can project that there will be more than 200,000 accesses during2001 from current participants, a six-fold increase from 1999. Clearly thevalue of JSTOR participation is increasing for these participants.

JSTOR’s growth is due in large part to a well-understood mission thatdrives everything that we do in the organization. Our dual mission is tobuild a trusted archive of academic journals and to provide better accessto the scholarly material in it. The focus of this mission serves to focus theorganization, allowing us to take into account the interests, ideas andfeedback of participants on an ongoing basis and to do the things that ourparticipants want us to do. This is what we consider success. Most re-cently, for example, with input from students, faculty and librarians, weupdated our website interface to make JSTOR even easier to navigate.

We constantly look for ways that will help participating institutions toleverage their participation in JSTOR more effectively, to get more out of

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being JSTOR participants. Another example is linking, certainly amongthe most requested features that we hear about from participants. As a re-sult of that interest, JSTOR developed tools for participants to use in cre-ating links from electronic reserves or course-packs to articles in JSTOR.Now librarians and faculty members can use the tool-kit on the JSTORwebsite to make durable links that will take students from reading lists tothe required articles. We think community colleges will be able to makegreat use of this tool.

A GLANCE TOWARDS THE FUTURE

JSTOR continues to expand and to work closely with librarians, pub-lishers and scholars to develop new journal collections. This year andnext, JSTOR expects to introduce at least two new collections, Businessand a stand-alone Language & Literature Collection. We imagine thateach of those collections will be of great interest to community collegesbecause of the high usage that already exists at community colleges in thearea of literature, and because of the many programs and courses in busi-ness that community colleges offer.

We look forward to working closely with community college partici-pants as they introduce the archive to their communities.

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