Libraries have traditionally served a dual role for their constituents, archiving knowledge and simultaneously providing access to that information. With physical barriers to access crumbling thanks to the Internet, students and faculty now have many different potential portals for accessing scholarly information. Librarians have taken an active role in the academic environment by developing new software and services to help ensure suitable access to quality information for their faculty, staff, and students. To assist with these efforts, JSTOR is embarking upon a program to help participating institutions educate their audiences about the library's role as access provider by building partnerships and establishing linking projects.

As an initial step in supporting the library as a central point of access to information, JSTOR is partnering with individual libraries and cooperative projects such as The California Digital Library (CDL) to link local collections and local indexes to the JSTOR database. The CDL is a virtual library offering a range of electronic resources to the University of California academic community. Recently CDL has been working diligently to link many of these electronic resources. According to Beverlee French, Director for Shared Collections at CDL, "A critical component of the CDL mission is to integrate available resources for our users.There is a large number of such resources, so the linking must be dynamic and it must be scalable.Since JSTOR is heavily used in the UC system, linking the contents of the JSTOR database to the various abstract and indexing databases loaded locally at CDL was a natural next step."

This type of "dynamic" or "algorithmic" linking to the JSTOR database is made possible, in great part, because of the database architecture decisions made by JSTOR several years ago. The decision to develop stable links, based upon the citation information about the article, allows an institution to develop local links "on the fly" based upon a stable algorithm.In JSTOR's case, that stable algorithm is based upon the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) standard.

As a next step JSTOR is implementing a new interface feature called the Provider Designation Service. A "provider designation" is a brief statement that will appear at the top of each dynamically created page in the JSTOR web site. The statement includes the name of the participating institution and will indicate to users that access to JSTOR is provided by their library. "The provider designation feature is a direct way to let our users know of the role their library plays in bringing JSTOR and other electronic resources to their desktops," says Kristen Garlock, JSTOR User Services Coordinator.

These initial efforts by JSTOR are but small steps in a long-term program to work cooperatively with libraries to enhance the library's role as access provider to their end users. As researchers rely increasingly on electronic resources, the role of librarians as highly skilled guides to the best available information is only likely to expand.

Last updated on September 8, 2006