One of the key components of JSTOR's mission is extending and enhancing access to the published literature included in the archive. As the scholarly community gravitates toward the use of the Web as its primary medium of communication, and as more and more scholarly resources are made available electronically, it is evident that students, faculty, and researchers will seek information through an almost unlimited number of avenues. To make access for these users as convenient as possible, we are working to facilitate connections between a broad range of resources and the JSTOR archive (e.g., from references in other articles, abstract and indexing databases, course syllabuses, online catalogs, web projects, etc.). Ideally, these connections will bring the user directly to the article, book review, or other item that they are seeking-- the kind of connections that are often referred to as "deep links."

The large number of article items in the JSTOR database (1.3 million items and growing) has made it necessary for JSTOR to develop a methodology that allows other resources to automate the link creation process. Furthermore, JSTOR includes previously published literature from many different publishers, which means that each title has its own idiosyncrasies that cannot be altered to fit a structure that we might like to impose (for example, changes in series, volume, or issue numbering schemes over the course of a journal's run). These factors have made the process of creating unique and working identifiers for JSTOR somewhat complicated.

The first step taken to establish an appropriate process was to adopt a standard for building stable URLs to content within JSTOR, so that these URLs could be built from citation information about the articles. To this end, JSTOR adopted the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) standard as an article level identifier and as the core of our stable and citation-derivable URLs. SICI is an ANSI/NISO standard that was developed to uniquely identify serial items, typically issues, and their contributions, typically articles. SICI "is intended to be applicable to both automated parsing and human-readable environments" (SICI Standard, http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/SICI/), and it is also compatible with other industry standards. While JSTOR did consider other options for stable URLs (for example, a simpler identifier such as <volume number>/<issue number>/<first page>), the journal content within JSTOR is sufficiently complicated that a simpler standard could not encompass all the varieties of our journal metadata.

To simplify the process of creating article-level access into the JSTOR archive, we developed a set of tools that will derive article location information from basic citation information provided by a linking party. In cases where the linking partners already have citation information, either because the organization publishes an abstract and indexing (A&I) database or because the organization is a library where the citation information is already contained within a local online catalog, they can algorithmically create stable SICI-based URLs to articles within JSTOR.

To assist in overall quality control and to reduce the occurrence of "bad" links, we have developed a series of tools to assist our linking partners with creating and checking the accuracy of those SICI identifiers and URLs. These tools are available on our Make-a-Link server, which was made available to registered users and organizations in May 2001. It is our hope that use of this toolset will simplify the process of linking to JSTOR articles, and will assist in sustaining the quality and permanence of the links that are created. According to Bruce Heterick, Director for Library Relations and Team Leader for JSTOR's Linking Team:

We have been working on the technology to support linking to the JSTOR archive for some time. We are pleased to provide this linking workspace on our website. Our hope is that it will make it relatively easy for other resources to link to the archive, which will, in turn, enhance the convenience of access to JSTOR for end users at participating institutions. Because of the scale and chronological depth of the JSTOR archive, ensuring the quality of the links that are created from other sites to the articles in JSTOR will be a real challenge, and we recognize that the release of the workspace is just the beginning of a long process. We welcome your feedback and look forward to improving the linking space as we gain experience.

In the coming months, JSTOR will continue to build upon and improve its linking infrastructure. In addition to our work with participating libraries and publishers, we actively are engaged in a number of linking projects with database providers and linking services. We anticipate having several of those projects implemented prior to the fall semester. If you are interested in linking to the JSTOR archive, please go to http://makealink.jstor.org/public . If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at jstor.linking@lists.jstor.org

Last updated on September 8, 2006