The Need for JSTOR

Pressures on Libraries

Much has been written about the pressures besetting libraries, including:

1. Increasing subscriptions costs: acquisitions budgets are being strained by the rising cost of journal subscriptions, especially in the sciences. These price increases have crowded out purchases of other materials, such as books and monographs.
2. Tighter budgets: even as costs rise, libraries are being asked to cut, not augment, their budgets. Among other things, these reductions have forced many libraries to cancel journal subscriptions.
3. Rising expectations - library users are demanding more, not less. They expect their libraries to provide higher levels of service and to make more material available.

Electronic Publishing

The rapid development of information technologies - and specifically electronic publishing capabilities - leads many in the library community to believe that there may be ways to ease the pressures. The (presumably) reduced costs associated with editing, producing, storing and distributing electronic content has led to the hope in some quarters that journal prices might actually decline, or that an alternate, less expensive publishing model might emerge (i.e. self-publishing by scholars).

Unfortunately, none of the electronic publishing initiatives to date has resulted in significant savings for libraries. Those publishers that offer electronic and print subscriptions tend to sell them for a "bundled" price, usually on the order of 10 to 30% over the price of the paper subscription alone. Reluctant to give up their paper subscriptions, libraries are purchasing electronic versions in addition to the paper copies, actually raising the cost of the subscription. In these early experimental days, libraries have justified these additional expenditures on the grounds that they are offering a higher level of service to their users while also learning about the impact and usage patterns of electronic forms of scholarly literature. Although such decisions can be made (and justified) for the first electronic experiments, this approach is unlikely to be sustainable indefinitely.

Lack of Space

In addition to rising prices, the limit on available stack space represents another challenge to libraries. The number of journals being published continues to grow, as does the number of pages published annually by each journal. It is becoming increasingly difficult for any individual library to keep pace with the growth in published material. One library inventory showed that approximately 25 percent of its shelves contained old journals and government documents. With new material arriving daily, a question facing many libraries today is whether to build new storage extensions or separate buildings to provide remote shelf space. As librarians contemplate moving books and journals to remote locations, the economic cost of physical space becomes immediate. Librarians must balance the trade-offs between the cost of storage and the cost of retrieval. Meanwhile, patrons worry about the difficulty and delay incurred when requesting materials stored in remote locations.

The JSTOR Solution

Here, electronic information technologies promise a clear solution. With digital information, convenience of access is not tied to the physical proximity of materials. Also, information stored electronically requires less space. The question is: does it cost less? The joint report of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (entitled "Preserving Digital Information") suggests that it is not less expensive for a single library to convert paper to digital formats for the purpose of freeing up shelf space. However, if the materials to be digitized are held in many libraries, and the costs can be shared, savings can be captured.

JSTOR is intended to demonstrate these propositions for scholarly journals. If successful, JSTOR will both reduce the longterm costs associated with storing these materials and increase dramatically the convenience of accessing them. Even if older journals are presently available on shelves in the library itself, it is not easy to find a particular article or reference, especially if the item in question was published some time ago. Older journal articles, for example, may not be indexed in the electronic databases that have become so popular. Furthermore, even if the specific citation is known, the item may be checked out, or worse, may be missing from the collection for one reason or another. By converting the older materials to digital formats and making them searchable, JSTOR injects new life into materials that may seem moribund.

Libraries and the Electronic Future

The movement toward the use of electronic technologies has introduced new challenges for libraries and library staff. Retraining the traditional librarian to accept the new technologies and provide reference services for the electronic materials has been one such challenge that appears to have been largely overcome. Almost all major libraries now have computer equipment (although never enough!) and are connected to a network that allows users to gain access to electronic products, services and databases.

But the widespread availability of electronic technologies introduces problems that have not yet been solved. Librarians remain concerned about the level of support they need to provide for thousands of different electronic interfaces, and they want to learn more about the impact of the new technologies on the usage of scholarly materials.

In addition, librarians, and many others, are becoming increasingly concerned about who is going to be responsible for archiving electronic materials. These materials not only include previously published literature that has been converted from paper to electronic, but also content that has been published in electronic form. To help address this particular concern, JSTOR has launched its Electronic-Archiving Initiative, the mission of which is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that this literature will remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.

JSTOR offers libraries – really for the first time – an opportunity to answer some of these questions for an important component of their overall collections: core scholarly journals.

Last updated on September 8, 2006