Through a creative three-year grant-making program, a group of 35 private and public colleges and universities in Minnesota and the Dakotas is encouraging JSTOR use on campus in ways that are leading to exciting new faculty-librarian collaborations.

Project JSTOR is an initiative of the Minnesota Private College Research Foundation (MPCRF) and is funded by The Bush Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The largest aspect of the initiative is a series of Faculty-Librarian Instructional Partnership (FLIP) grants designed to improve teaching methods and student learning through greater use of information resources, particularly JSTOR.

David B. Laird, Jr., President of MPCRF, notes that the program is successfully helping both faculty and students. "Project JSTOR has opened new avenues for building student research-based learning, critical thinking and information literacy skills," he reports. "In addition, program activities have created a context for strengthening faculty research and pedagogy."

With funding of up to $8,000, each FLIP grant enables teams of at least one academic faculty member and one librarian to revise course content, develop tutorials, and enhance research-based learning using JSTOR and other digital tools. The grants, says Sandra Mueller, Grant Director for Project JSTOR, are ""a concerted effort to enhance curricula using JSTOR."

Kristen Garlock, JSTOR's Manager of Outreach, Training, and User Assistance, who has conducted workshops for MPCRF, believes that other institutions can learn from the program:

We have been contacted by many librarians around the country seeking more information about incorporating JSTOR into the curriculum. The librarians and faculty members involved in these grants are initiating excellent projects that we look forward to sharing as examples for other institutions.

At the University of Minnesota, Morris, for example, Matthew Conner, an Instruction Librarian, and Janet Schrunk Ericksen, Associate Professor of English, are bringing the Middle Ages up-to-date by integrating online resources into a seminar on Old English literature. Because Morris is a small campus, access to historic manuscripts and other materials has traditionally been limited. The team has developed a course website that introduces students to sites that offer these rare resources, and uses JSTOR's rich collection of medieval studies journals as a gateway for research.

The grant program is encouraging this work in a wide range of academic disciplines. A FLIP grant at the University of South Dakota is helping MBA students learn the skills of formal empirical research. The project got underway this summer when Stephen K. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Library Science, and Angeline M. Lavin, Assistant Professor of Finance at the School of Business, found nearly 900 articles on corporate finance in the JSTOR archive and organized them into an EndNote database. This fall, the 34 students in the finance seminar formed small groups, chose a topic and received instruction on using JSTOR for their research. Surveying the students before class began, Professors Johnson and Lavin discovered that only 53 percent of the students had used a library's online database for research, only 24 percent had read scholarly articles, and only 6 percent were comfortable using JSTOR. The project, "Development of a Hands-on Empirical Project for the MBA Financial Administration Course," offered students the opportunity to expand their research skills, review literature, and test theories with real data.

Creating models is in fact one of the key goals underlying the FLIP grant program. Explains Sandra Mueller, "Something really clicked in encouraging faculty and librarians to collaborate. These partnerships have been very exciting; we hope they can be models not only for their own campuses, but for other campuses as well."

More information on Project JSTOR is available at
http://www.mnprivatecolleges.com/jstor/index.php
Information on specific FLIP grants can be found at
http://www.mnprivatecolleges.com/projectjstor/flip.html

Last updated on September 8, 2006