Part I: Bibliographic information
Type: Database/academic
Title: JSTOR
Publisher: ITHAKA
Origination date: 1997 -- full-text indexing dates to 1990
Broad Focus: Academic Curriculum
Subject(s): Multidisciplinary
Specific inclusions of note: International studies, arts, humanities, history, law, medicine, social science
Full text: Yes; 4,700 journals
Indexed/Abstracted: Yes; Over 1,000 archival journals and 50 current journals; Over 300 primary resources
Target audience: Secondary, undergraduate, graduate, libraries
Online: Free limited access is available at www.jstor.org; or, the full services is available by subscription using a tiered pricing structure for various intitutions.
Comparables: Academic Research (more science focused); Gale Virtual Reference Services.
Part I: User’s Annotation, Summary, Critical Evaluation
User’s Annotation -- This database service offers a broad selection of topically categorized academic journal articles and primary sources available for view text viewing to subscribers and offering free access to the public on some materials.
Summary --
JSTOR was one of the first efforts to offer digital online access to a breadth of academic journals and sources. In cooperation with a number of scholarly presses, JSTOR now offers online access to a over 14,000 academic books. This is a niche that needed filling as increasingly fewer libraries are expanding and maintaining the print libraries. It offers an alternative to ILL and opens access to hard-to-find subject specific materials.
The interface includes both search and browse approaches. This now allows you to view summaries of all articles available and even includes books with chapter-by-chapter summaries. Rather than reiterate what JSTOR describes more accurately, here is their own description of their content:description of their products and services from their website:
JSTOR offers high-quality, interdisciplinary content to support scholarship and teaching. The JSTOR digital archive includes more than 1,500 leading academic journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work such as Hebrew language journals. The entire back runs of journals (from volume 1, issue 1) are always included, and in 2010 JSTOR expanded its vast collection of archival content to include the most recent issues of select academic journals through the Current Scholarship Program.
Additional collections include valuable primary source content. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references. The content is expanded continuously with an emphasis on international publications as well as pamphlets, images, and manuscripts from libraries, societies, and museums (JSTOR, 2013).
Critical Evaluation -- This service has a very broad focus in areas not covered in Academic Search Premier, including the arts and humanities among others. The interface is state-of-the-art and the indexing appears to be accurate and reliable. It is particularly useful if you follow one of the many subject for which they offer a subcategory, such as folklore (under Humanities) or library science (under Social Sciences).
Some interesting features worth noting:
- The services is adding access to academic books;
- There is an easy to use registration process available to the public that allows full text access to articles without going through an educational institution or library.
Part III: Publisher Info
Amazon describes the history of JSTOR as described in Richard Schonfeld’s book on the company as folllows: “Ten years ago, most scholars and students relied on bulky card catalogs, printed bibliographic indices, and hardcopy books and journals. Today, much content is available electronically or online. This book examines the history of one of the first, and most successful, digital resources for scholarly communication, JSTOR. Beginning as a grant-funded project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the University of Michigan, JSTOR has grown to become a major archive of the backfiles of academic journals, and its own nonprofit organization” (Book, 2003). JSTOR was purchased by Ithaka Harbors LLC, another Mellon-supported entity that works closely with the educational community serving the specialized needs of modern academia .
Part IV: Curriculum Ties, Diversity, Booktalk Ideas, Challenge Issues
Curriculum Ties, if any -- This database is well suited to scholars in the humanities and social sciences from secondary to graduate level work. It also offers unique feature to the independent scholar who might lack access to a traditional scholarly database.
Diversity of Cultures -- Originally, this database continues to offer an array of international studies categories, including African, British, Irish, Asian, Slavic, Latin and Middle Eastern studies. Additionally, there are indexes that are specific to Jewish and Native American materials.
Classroom Ideas -- Students should be more aware of the variety of online research tools that are available to them. A simple way to engage them is to ask for a literature review on any given topic and require that they use certain tools to access these articles. JSTOR should most certainly be a tool that students are introduced to early in their scholarly endeavors as it’s easy to use, broad in its content and subject focus and readily available whether their institution has a subscription or not.
Part V: Reasons chosen
Increasingly, primary and secondary educational institutions are hard pressed to afford expensive subscriptions to academic databases. However, there is an active need for maintaining the model that allows for the comprehensive and legal dissemination of copyrighted information and this requires some revenues. JSTOR has been at the forefront of the fight to maintain copyrighted materials as such and has been involved in a number of lawsuits to protect the certain materials and journal partners. To some degree, this puts them head-to-head with the open access movement that would like to free information. It’s my sense that JSTOR has worked very hard to find common ground that meets the needs for access to the public’s information and research by opening older materials for full text access as well as the rights of the content providers. JSTOR is also a user friendly interface that student’s can create an account on that can be used from home or anywhere they have internet access. This begins to break down that wall that keeps students from wanting to use peer-reviewed scholarly articles over easier to negotiate sources such as wikipedia. org.
Part VI: Citations
Book Description. (2003). JSTOR: A History. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/JSTOR-History-Roger-C-Schonfeld/dp/0691115311
JSTOR. (2013). Content on JSTOR [webpage]. Retrieved from http://about.jstor.org/content/content-jstor
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