Over the last year we have received an increasing number of requests for access from secondary schools around the country. In response to this interest we have launched a pilot project to explore whether JSTOR will be valuable to this community and, if so, how best to make it available. For those of us who have been around JSTOR since the beginning this is very reminiscent of our earliest steps to test interest in the concept at colleges and universities.

From our initial conversations and meetings with high school administrators, librarians, and faculty, we are convinced that the pilot is important. There is some evidence that JSTOR can have an impact on issues such as:

Access to high quality scholarship - scholarly research journals are generally not available at high schools. Some might argue that that is because these journals have a scholarly focus that is not relevant to the work of high school students. JSTOR can help test whether this is true by making access to back issues of journals convenient and location-independent.

Offering reliable information - with students at all levels increasingly relying on the Web for information (sometimes at the exclusion of any other source), teachers are concerned about the quality and integrity of the information that students get from the Web. Might JSTOR be a useful, controlled and reliable information environment to which teachers can direct students?

Teaching students basic research techniques - JSTOR's historical depth offers opportunities for librarians and faculty to teach students how to conduct research. For example, there are countless possibilities for assignments to trace the development of an idea over the course of time, or for studying how different academic disciplines approach a similar topic in different ways.

Promoting staff development - JSTOR can be an important research resource for faculty, as well as an integral resource in local curriculum development.

The pilot participants include 7 public and 7 private high schools from seven states around the country:

Hunter College High School (New York, NY)
Stuyvesant High School (New York, NY)
Bronx High School of Science (Bronx, NY)
The Dalton School (New York, NY)
Ethical Cultural Fieldston Schools (New York, NY)
Scarsdale High School (Scarsdale, NY)
Lakeside School (Seattle, WA)
Phillips Exeter Academy (Exeter, NH)
Bronxville Public Schools (Bronxville, NY)
University High School (San Francisco, CA)
Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School (St. Louis, MO)
Newton Public Schools (Newtonville, MA)
Westminster Schools (Atlanta, GA)
Great Neck Public Schools (Great Neck, NY)

The pilot program is scheduled to run through the end of the 2001 calendar year. Schools are being asked to contribute staff time to ensure that faculty and students are aware of the availability of the resource and to provide feedback to JSTOR and to each other in exchange for access to the database during the pilot period. Our goal is for this pilot program to be a positive experience for each school, while at the same time providing JSTOR with important feedback on the utility of the resource at this academic level. We are grateful to the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation for providing support for this initiative.

Last updated on September 8, 2006