JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services exists so libraries and archives can maximize the discovery and impact of their distinctive collections. Today, I’m delighted to share that, with new support from the Mellon Foundation, we will help many more institutions advance this public good—expanding the discovery, use, and long-term impact of distinctive collections through JSTOR Stewardship.
Distinctive collections are among the most important resources that institutions steward, and it has never been more important than it is today that we ground scholarship and public discourse in the original sources—the actual evidence—contained in these collections. Yet, in too many cases, these collections do not achieve their potential impact. Notwithstanding the commitment of thousands of devoted practitioners, fragmented systems, constrained resources, unsustainable workflows, and aging infrastructure have kept them all too hidden from public view. Our conviction about the urgency of this situation—and our sense of responsibility, as a community partner, to help meet the need—led us to work with librarians and archivists to develop and launch a modern, integrated digital collections platform designed for impact: JSTOR Stewardship.
Distinctive collections are among the most important resources that institutions steward, and it has never been more important than it is today that we ground scholarship and public discourse in the original sources—the actual evidence—contained in these collections.
The funding provided by the Mellon Foundation will enable many more institutions to create a more public future for their distinctive collections. With this support, new and existing JSTOR Stewardship charter participants will be able to expand their digitization efforts significantly, using JSTOR Seeklight to process materials at scale and JSTOR itself as the front end for discovery and impact.
How JSTOR Stewardship supports impact
As a digital collections platform, JSTOR Stewardship offers infrastructure and community that enable libraries to fulfill their stewardship responsibilities and increase the impact of their collections. Several elements of this approach are essential to that purpose.
The first is innovative support for collections processing, which is the foundation of discovery and accessibility. JSTOR Seeklight, our AI-enabled collections processing tool, was co-created with librarians and archivists to help them process materials at scale. More than 50 libraries are already using Seeklight to work through backlogs of unprocessed materials, and sharing their experiences to guide its ongoing development.
A second is helping libraries get those materials, once processed, into research and instructional workflows. Stewardship uses the JSTOR platform itself as its front end, so participating libraries can make their distinctive collections available where their own students and scholars already work, and extend their reach to the tens of millions of other users worldwide who visit JSTOR each year. Collections shared on JSTOR retain full institutional branding while being situated within the broader scholarly record—alongside the scholarship that interprets them and the distinctive materials contributed by hundreds of other institutions. In this richer context, new research pathways, relationships, and adjacencies emerge that would otherwise remain hidden. Today, libraries have made more than 3 million items openly available on JSTOR—a number that will grow rapidly thanks to Seeklight.
Of course, none of this is possible without a strong digital asset management foundation—and we’ve just rebuilt ours from the ground up, using modern design principles, JSTOR-scale engineering, and the latest security and accessibility standards. Stewardship also safeguards future access: the Portico preservation infrastructure ensures that collections digitized, described, and shared today will remain available, trustworthy, and usable for future scholarship.
For many institutions, digitizing at scale has been cost-prohibitive. Now, with the Mellon Foundation’s support, institutions participating in the JSTOR Stewardship charter program will be able to receive direct support for digitization.
We are building JSTOR Stewardship in close collaboration with the library community. To take one example, our charter community of Seeklight participants meets monthly, co-creating AI-assisted collections processing tools and practices with our team by sharing feedback, highlighting use cases, and engaging in dialogue on emerging issues and opportunities. Because we are a nonprofit organization, our work building JSTOR Stewardship is focused solely on serving the needs of participating institutions and the users they seek to reach. This is an exciting moment to see what we can do together.
What the initiative makes possible
For many institutions, digitizing at scale has been cost-prohibitive. Now, with the Mellon Foundation’s support, institutions participating in the JSTOR Stewardship charter program will be able to receive direct support for digitization.
This will vastly expand the charter community’s impact, and help participating institutions activate the infrastructure we have been building together. Participating institutions will use Seeklight for processing, ensuring strong discoverability and accessibility for these materials at scale. In addition, they will publish these collections openly on JSTOR for maximum reach. This approach will allow libraries to generate much greater impact from their collections than was possible with traditional processing models or discovery and access architectures, significantly increasing the return on investment in this work.
Distinctive collections deserve a more public future. The work to build that future is already underway, and we invite you to be part of it.
The initiative also has several other elements. Through Reveal Digital, it will pilot a community-centered model for cross-institutional curation within JSTOR Stewardship, helping institutions identify areas of shared significance, connect related holdings, and develop coherent, research-useful thematic collections while preserving local authority, context, and stewardship responsibilities. Throughout, Ithaka S+R will conduct assessment and public reporting, generating evidence about implementation, workflows, labor, discovery and use, environmental considerations, and the role of AI-assisted processing in expanding access. That evidence matters because impact must not only be achieved but also understood and demonstrated if institutions are to sustain and grow this work over time.
Built for the public good
This is a unique moment for the scholarly and cultural record. There’s an urgent need to center original sources in scholarly and societal discourse at the very moment when new technologies make it possible to do so at scale. This moment also requires choices about how distinctive collections will enter the digital future—and how to ensure that public access, institutional autonomy, and community stewardship remain at the center.
With support from the Mellon Foundation, we aim to provide our community with ways to accelerate this work while staying grounded in our values. Through this initiative, we have an opportunity to help more distinctive collections move from local stewardship into broader public access and use—and to do so in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, the authority and agency of the institutions that steward them.
Distinctive collections deserve a more public future. The work to build that future is already underway through the JSTOR Stewardship charter community, and this initiative gives us an opportunity to go further together. If your institution is not yet participating in our charter program, we invite you to join. You can learn more here.
