JSTOR Report

Many regular readers of this newsletter no doubt have some experience with JSTOR—the Journal Storage Project. Perhaps you’ve had the chance to use it at a university campus library or on your own computer at home through an individual subscription to the WMQ back issues. Perhaps you remember the updates Becky Wrenn used to write in this space. As Becky did for many years, I have traveled for the past two years to New York City in May to attend the JSTOR Participating Publishers Meeting and to meet the people behind the little “J” symbol. The Institute has been a loyal supporter of JSTOR since “the beginning ”—hardly time immemorial, but 1995, when the William and Mary Quarterly was one of the first ten journals to undergo JSTOR’s digitization process. What a difference a decade makes! As of May there were 718 journals available online through JSTOR, with a further 180 under contract. The number of journals published outside the United States is increasing, and JSTOR is experimenting with journals published in languages that do not use Roman characters, which present a special challenge. Access to the archive is growing steadily, not only within the United States but outside it. JSTOR’s Africa Initiative has seen an impressive return: JSTOR is now available in 28 African nations (with no fees), and where in 2005 there were 37 participating institutions in Africa, there are now 165. JSTOR has turned its attention to increasing access in other parts of the developing world.

With such growth, it is only natural that there should be some changes in the wind. Those of you who are regular JSTOR users should expect to see a change in the database’s Web appearance soon, when JSTOR migrates onto its new technology platform, the first such change in its history. WMQ is now a participant in JSTOR’s new Publisher Sales Service Program, a sort of “pay-per-view” system that allows people without JSTOR access who find a JSTOR article through a Google search to purchase access to that article only. (Of course, individual subscriptions to all the back issues of WMQ on JSTOR are also available to users without institutional access; for more information, please visit our Web site at http://oieahc.wm.edu.) JSTOR is also expanding beyond its initial purpose to the digitization of “Contributed Collections.” A consortium of research libraries in the United Kingdom recently contacted JSTOR for advice on digitizing collections of nineteenth-century pamphlets related to Parliamentary debates. It was decided that while the consortium would handle the digitization, JSTOR would host the content and link it with the rest of the archive. Another such project is underway in partnership with Queens University of Belfast to create an “Irish Studies Collection” of journals, monographs, and manuscripts. JSTOR is identifying other potential partners for such projects.

In this recent move, JSTOR is adopting some of the characteristics of other databases which largely benefit historians: taking on a project that aims to preserve and bring together primary, not secondary, literature. As any historian knows, these databases have proliferated in recent years, and I doubt if any of us can really appreciate how hard it would have been to comprehend today’s state of affairs twenty or even ten years ago. How could we have predicted that nineteenth-century newspapers, eighteenth-century magazines, and rare folios from the early days of print could all be accessed from our desks? Will there come a time when that old stereotype of the aging, gray historian peering through spectacles at a crumbling book in a dim archive no longer makes sense to a generation raised on the stereotype of the historian bent over at the neck to peer more closely at a digital reproduction of an eighteenth-century scrawl? And, crucially, are we better off for the change? Today the proliferation of easy-to-reach resources entices us to believe that to be “comprehensive” is an achievable goal. Almost as difficult as drawing reliable history out of fragmentary sources is the task of imposing a reliable (or passably reliable) narrative on a chaotic profusion of texts, and some might challenge the validity of doing so at all.

All scholars should be pondering the electronic revolution, even those who prefer to ignore its existence, because its leaders are already taking it places most of us cannot comprehend. Many people probably view electronic sources as complements to paper or as a method of bringing faraway pieces of paper close to hand, but JSTOR and a related organization, Ithaka, are asking whether electronic sources should replace paper. Ithaka is interested in how universities and university presses are and should be responding to digitization. As part of the JSTOR meeting, a representative from Ithaka, Roger Schonfeld, reported on a survey the organization had done of faculty members and academic librarians to gauge their willingness to conceive of “digital repositories” as replacements for print libraries. Digital repositories, where they exist (which is mostly at very large research universities), are generally used to store special collections and images these days, but Schonfeld wanted to know how many people were thinking of them not just as additional library resources but as the libraries of the future. How open are scholars, librarians, and publishers today to an e-only publishing and scholarship world?

To be frank, the average scholar is more open to it than the average historian. Unsurprisingly, Schonfeld reported that scholars in the humanities are more likely to continue to value traditional methods of research and hard-copy texts. But though a majority of academic librarians whose universities already had digital repositories stated that they believed librarians would need to continue what they already do in digital form, a surprising (to me) 47 percent thought that the institution of a new system rather than a continuation of the old was important. In other words, almost half felt that libraries as we know them would have to change. Perhaps in pursuit of that goal, at least in the arena of journal publishing, librarians are showing some eagerness to convert entirely to electronic formats. Sixty-five percent of librarians agreed that they would be happy to only receive journals electronically and to cancel their current print subscriptions. Meanwhile, 45 percent would be happy to see the hard copies their libraries own discarded, assuming e-resources were stable. Only 21 percent believed that it will always be crucial to maintain hard copies of journals. Faculty are more reluctant to get rid of hard copies, but the same percentage as among librarians are content to see libraries no longer subscribe to the print version. For Schonfeld, the implications were clear: university presses and academic publishers whose profits depended on libraries’ purchase of print were in danger.

This danger is perhaps not as pressing for historians as for members of other disciplines. After all, only 40 percent of historians are happy to see current print issues cancelled by the library, in comparison with 75 percent of engineers. It would also be unwise to regard the print vs. electronic question as entirely either/or: WMQ’s agreement with History Cooperative, a database that currently houses journal articles in plain text (rather than the digital page images used by JSTOR), links the print and electronic publications so that neither libraries nor individuals can purchase one without the other. If they want to destroy the paper, that’s their business. Yet universities, encouraged by scientists who feel they’re far behind, may end up dragging reluctant historians forward into a new age of digitization. When that happens, the historians will be better prepared and more content with the change if they’ve already grappled with the ramifications of digitization. Some may even join the scientists on the “dragging” side of things. Indeed, some already have.

Meg Musselwhite JSTOR Coordinator and Assistant to the Director