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  • This week, EDUCAUSE Review explores the collaboration between JSTOR Labs and Columbia Libraries on the Reimagining the Monograph project, which resulted in the speedy creation of the TopicGraph prototype tool. EDUCAUSE liked what it saw, writing that the two organizations “hit on a new approach to doing fun, engaging, fast-paced discovery by pulling together the best…

  • You’ve probably heard that metadata is “data about data.” But that definition grates on Jabin White, ITHAKA’s vice president of content management. While correct, he says that explanation often calls for another. White instead compares metadata to “an instruction manual for users of content.” He elucidates this concept in a recent article on Metadata 2020,…

  • JSTOR and the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM EKUAL) have announced a historic 3-year national agreement. In this arrangement, JSTOR will provide full access to 2,500+ journals and 2,100+ research reports on the JSTOR platform to 197 Turkish higher education and research institutions. JSTOR collaborates with the academic community to help libraries provide…

  • Louise Jones, university librarian at Chinese University of Hong Kong, has joined JSTOR’s Library Advisory Group. The group is composed of leading librarians from around the globe and provides JSTOR with guidance on strategic questions and decisions. Ms. Jones became university librarian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. While there, she has…

  • As it has for the past two years, Wikipedia is encouraging librarians to add reliable references to articles from January 15 to February 3 as part of its #1Lib1Ref campaign. And as we did last year, JSTOR is getting involved! We’ve updated our 1Lib1Ref LibGuide with easy instructions on how to find, evaluate, and link…

  • Text Analyzer, the tool that allows you to use your own documents to search for articles and books in JSTOR, is now capable of analyzing content in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Using Text Analyzer remains as easy as always – simply upload a document, copy…

  • JSTOR has long participated as a Crossref affiliate, and now our digital content manager Lauren Lissaris has expanded that relationship by becoming a Crossref Ambassador. Crossref advocates persistent cross-publisher citation linking using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in online academic journals, and its new Crossref Ambassadors program brings together volunteers from the international scholarly research community…

  • At ITHAKA, JSTOR’s parent organization, we manage nearly 20 social media accounts to connect with and listen to you. In the grand tradition of year-end lists, here is a roundup of the top ten things we’ve learned from and about you through social media in 2017, in classic countdown fashion: 10. 75% of you access…

  • You never know what you might find in JSTOR. No, really! Just ask Isaure Mignotte, the Department of Comparative Literature coordinator at Harvard University. She wrote us that her mother was preparing an exhibition for Camille Piton, a family artist who was once involved with The Art Amateur, a journal published in the 19th century.…

  • We are partnering with Google Scholar to introduce more streamlined access to JSTOR. Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) grants students access to an institution’s licensed content off-campus. CASA builds on Google Scholar’s Subscriber Links program; when a researcher visits Google Scholar while on campus, it remembers their affiliation. Then, when away from campus, they’ll continue…

  • On October 30, Alex Humphreys of JSTOR Labs participated in a Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) regional event focused on innovative methods of scholarship. Joining Jen Grayburn (Temple University) and Kathi Martin (Drexel University) in a panel presentation, Alex discussed how JSTOR is experimenting with design thinking and lean development techniques to build tools that enhance…

  • Books at JSTOR was named 2017’s “Most Improved Product” in The Charleston Advisor’s sixteenth annual Readers’ Choice Awards. Voters praised the program’s greater breadth of content, DRM-free access model, and Open Access ebook offering. The Charleston Advisor publishes peer-reviewed appraisals of online resources for libraries, and the Readers’ Choice Awards recognize the best–and in the…

  • Have you heard about the JSTOR thesaurus? Launched in 2013, the thesaurus comprises several source thesauri and controlled vocabularies and is being integrated with the JSTOR platform to improve searching and evaluation of content. In early October, Sharon Garewal, Senior Metadata Librarian, conducted a 30-minute introductory webinar to JSTOR’s subject thesaurus and how we’re using…

  • Signing up for a free MyJSTOR account is now even easier! You can now skip the registration form by signing up with your Google account. Afterward, you’ll always be able to sign in with one click. With a MyJSTOR account, you can save your citations to My Lists, an evolving feature that allows you to…

  • Sweet! JSTOR Daily received the Best Non-Newspaper Food Feature award from the Association of Food Journalists for Cara Strickland’s “Why Was Turkish Delight C.S. Lewis’s Guilty Pleasure?” The Association of Food Journalists is a professional organization dedicated to preserving and perpetuating responsible food journalism, and this year’s awards recognized excellence in 13 categories of food…

  • On August 29, Library Journal and JSTOR hosted a panel on the benefits and tradeoffs of Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA). EBA is a purchasing model that allows academic librarians to combine insights from usage data with their deep knowledge of local research and teaching needs to build an ebook collection that serves patrons now and in…

  • JSTOR is now one of more than 700 organizations currently working with ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID is a not-for-profit that provides unique identifying codes to scientific and other academic authors and contributors.

  • A recent piece in The Atlantic highlighted the negative social and mental health effects smartphones are having on American teens. Not so fast, says Alexandra Samuel, JSTOR Daily’s tech columnist. Samuel shifts the focus to the effects of smartphone culture on another generation—the parents of those teens. The story is being cited in the New…

  • JSTOR now offers the complete run of Scientific American from 1845 to 2012, with new content to be added each year. Scientific American is included in the JSTOR Life Sciences collection, where it joins more than 150 other esteemed publications. The addition of Scientific American expands JSTOR’s coverage of a broad range of scientific fields,…

  • You may have noticed that JSTOR has become easier to use. That’s because we recently rolled out a new visual design that enhances the searching and browsing experience, and clarifies access options. The functionality you’ve come to expect remains the same, and the redesigned interface now features: A search box at the top of every…

  • A new article by the National Endowment for the Humanities highlights JSTOR’s Arabic-Language Digitization Project. The author details the recent 2017 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant in support of JSTOR’s plan for the digitization of Arabic-language scholarly journals, explaining the challenges that have faced previous efforts and the urgency of such a project. Read the article on the NEH website.

  • The JSTOR Labs team has released the final version version of “Reimagining the Digital Monograph,” a free white paper that addresses community-driven research and makes recommendations for improving the user experience of digital monographs. The draft version of the paper was released for public comment in December 2016 along with Topicgraph, a prototype visualization tool…

  • Portico, ITHAKA’s digital preservation service, welcomed the University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany as its 1,000th participant this month. The Library is one of 53 German institutions that joined following an exhaustive evaluation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), which recommended participation in Portico as part of their national strategy for digital preservation…

  • JSTOR and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are pleased to announce they have renewed their longstanding agreement to preserve and make available over 100 years of Science via the JSTOR platform. JSTOR and AAAS first began working together in 1998 when Science was among the earliest journals converted from print to…

  • Today, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced funding for 208 humanities projects, including a $50,000 grant to JSTOR to support research on the high-quality digitization and digital preservation of Arabic-language scholarly journals. JSTOR’s NEH-funded research will include the development of digitization and indexing guidelines for Arabic-language scholarly journals in the humanities and social…

  • Among the most critical areas of study at academic institutions today is our changing environment and its impact on society. It is also one of the most challenging given its fundamentally transdisciplinary nature and the range of publications, data, and sources needed to conduct research in the field. JSTOR, the not-for-profit digital library, aims to…

  • JSTOR by the numbers: more content for libraries in 2016 Our “moving wall” advances in 2017, adding another year of archival journal content to the JSTOR platform. In 2016 alone, we added 91 journals and 435,000+ articles, representing 3.2 million pages and 797 linear feet of shelf space savings. Our ebooks program, Books at JSTOR,…

  • In late 2016, the JSTOR Labs team collaborated with librarians, scholars, and publishers to explore the challenge of improving discovery and user experience of digital monographs. Informed by these ideas, the team created Topicgraph, a prototype visualization tool for a set of open access monographs. Additionally, a draft of the white paper from the collaboration…

  • We’ve recently released several features on the platform: Topic pages: Topic pages (such as Storytelling) provide background and context for the many subjects covered in on JSTOR. They may be accessed via the hyperlinked subject terms that now appear on journal article and book chapter pages. The topics are a subset of a new 45,000-term…

  • Our “moving wall” advances in 2017, adding another year of archival journal content to the JSTOR platform. In 2016 alone, we added 91 journals and 435,000+ articles, representing 3.2 million pages and 797 linear feet of shelf space savings. Our ebooks program, Books at JSTOR, expanded with the addition of 10,000+ ebooks and 41 new…