Red–orange circular arrow encircling a grey, turbine-like spiral with radial pins and cloudlike shading on a pale background.

Milk Marketing Board. Collection of approximately 85 artworks for promotional purposes, 1945–1994. Science Museum Group.

As someone who has worked for years in service of libraries and scholarship, it comes as no surprise to me that words—and the ways we use them—matter. And as someone with a long career in product management and technology, I’m also familiar with how seemingly simple terms can refer to incredibly complex systems “under the hood.”

When we launched JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, we chose our language carefully. So when we talk about “content management” in that context, we don’t just mean storage—and certainly not just a place to park files. Instead, we’re referring to a dynamic system of engagement: one that supports institutions in making their digital collections usable, discoverable, and impactful over time.

In this blog post, I’ll unpack what “content management” actually entails in JSTOR Stewardship, and how, far from something basic and static, it serves as a cornerstone of a platform built for long-term sustainability, usability, and scale.

More than storage: Content management as stewardship in action

One way to understand what we mean by content management is to consider it alongside long-term storage on the one hand and long-term digital preservation on the other—considering all three terms and how they work together helps pinpoint both the distinctions and synergy.

Long-term storage can refer to any method of keeping files safe over time: an external hard drive, a cloud folder, or cold cloud storage like Amazon S3 Glacier. These methods are focused on durability, not usability. Content may be stored securely, but it’s often not described, discoverable, or ready for access and interaction.

Long-term digital preservation, such as that offered through our integration with Portico, goes further. It includes technical strategies aimed at keeping content usable and understandable over time—even as formats evolve and platforms change. Preservation of this kind involves ongoing management: monitoring file formats, maintaining metadata, and ensuring content can still be rendered and retrieved in the future.

Content management, as we define it within JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, is about day-to-day vitality and setting the stage for long-term viability. It’s the work that prepares materials for immediate use as well as preservation: describing, structuring, enriching, and optimizing content so it can be searched, streamed, discovered, and engaged with—by students, scholars, and communities right now and into the future.

When institutions load files into JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, they’re doing much more than simply “storing” them—they’re unlocking full functionality for discovery, access, and interaction. That includes generating a range of derivatives to support:

  • Zoomable images for deep scholarly examination
  • Transcoded audio and video for streaming
  • OCR and transcripts for search and accessibility
  • Thumbnails and metadata for preview and organization
  • API endpoints for integration and interoperability

All of this work happens behind the scenes, but it’s what makes collections dynamically accessible and research-ready—and it allows institutions to serve students, scholars, and community users with content that’s ready to be used, wherever they are.

Integration designed for scale and usability

Much of today’s digital stewardship work is about managing volume: large, varied, often complex content types coming in from numerous sources. That means systems need to be not just flexible, but genuinely scalable.

In JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, content management is designed with this scale in mind. We support large institutional archives, legacy digitization projects, born-digital collections, and everything in between. Our infrastructure is built to:

  • Handle high volumes of multimedia content
  • Minimize manual overhead for file prep and metadata
  • Enable metadata generation, collection management, publishing, and preservation in one integrated workflow

That integration matters—and it’s something I’ve written about elsewhere—because I believe it’s one of the most important things we’re doing. After all, when tools don’t talk to each other, work slows down, and valuable content can end up siloed—or lost.

The heart of discoverability, usability, and care

We often talk about stewardship as a cycle: ingest, describe, manage, preserve, share.

Content management sits at the center. It’s what allows us to move fluidly between these steps, and ensure collections remain useful across time and use cases.

Importantly, content management is also about care. It’s how we prepare materials for use without compromising their integrity. It’s how we enable broader discovery while respecting local priorities. And it’s how we build systems that honor the people who steward collections and the communities those collections serve.

So when we talk about content management, we’re not talking about a technical feature or a cost line. We’re talking about a fundamental component of responsible, effective digital stewardship. One that supports the real work our partners are doing every day—and one that we’re proud to build in collaboration with them.

To learn more about how JSTOR approaches digital stewardship and supports institutions in this work, explore our Stewardship services.

About the author

Ann Connolly has been supporting libraries for over 15 years, first at bepress Digital Commons and, most recently, as Senior Product Manager with ITHAKA. Her work over that time has encompassed a variety of topics, including open access, research impact, collection development policies, copyright and authors’ rights, and preservation. She currently co-leads efforts in developing products and services that address needs across the spectrum of collection stewardship activities.