In pursuing its mission to extend access to scholarly journal literature as broadly as possible, JSTOR has initiated a new outreach program to public and independent high schools in the U.S. Our decision to begin offering JSTOR to this diverse community was informed by the results of the JSTOR Secondary Schools Pilot Project, which ran in sixteen high schools throughout the U.S. from June 2000 until June 2002. The project devoted itself to exploring and assessing the value of the JSTOR archive in the secondary school community.¹

American high schools represented a distinctly different type of institution than JSTOR traditionally served, and we were not sure how, or if, this community would find access to journal literature valuable. Through the pilot, however, we learned that JSTOR can indeed serve three important functions in this setting:

• Access. Perhaps the greatest success of the pilot project was how access to JSTOR enabled many students to pursue meaningful research on topics where, in the past, there had been a dearth of resources. JSTOR content filled a void in school library holdings, providing material unobtainable from both print and electronic resources typically used in high schools.
• Information Integrity. In the K-12 educational setting, where it has been of increasing importance to assist students in acquiring the skills they will need in order to sort out substantive material from popular information available on the Web, JSTOR was reported to be very useful. According to one of the librarians from the pilot: "It is difficult to wean students from the ease of the Internet, but introducing concepts of refereed publications versus the free-for-all information provided by anyone and everyone that is so tempting on the Internet is beginning to make a difference." Teachers told us they truly valued letting their students "roam free" on JSTOR, with no fear that they would be wading through superficial material.
• Professional Development. Through the pilot project, we also learned that usage was often equally fueled by faculty. Across all disciplines, we heard stories of teachers using JSTOR to strengthen their content knowledge, for personal research, and to prepare lesson plans. History and English faculty were often at the forefront of such usage. One noted that, "Access to JSTOR has been extremely helpful to my rare but treasured moments of being able to read about and research some of the material I'm teaching for fresh perspectives." Science faculty, too, were thrilled with the availability of original papers written by such figures as Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, and Ernest Rutherford.

Just as librarians continue to help students learn how to distinguish scholarly material from popular, many high school teachers have long engaged their students in learning about the value of journal articles in research. As one history teacher informed us during the pilot, "I have always maintained that journal articles are vastly more useful to high school students than many monographs. They're cutting edge, they're specific, and they're just the right length to suit their attention spans." Another impressive example of introducing students to the world of journal literature came from an English teacher at one of our pilot schools:

In American Studies, we have asked our students to find a good journal article related to some aspect of Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, read it, present the basic ideas to the class, and write a brief critical review of the article. We hoped they would gain several different critical points of view, see the different ways in which scholars approach a text, measure their own thinking with that of the article's author (about issues or topics in the novel of personal interest or concern), and also exercise their critical thinking skills by engaging in vigorous intellectual dialog with the ideas and opinions expressed by the author.

Based on the success of the pilot project, in late November 2002, JSTOR announced the general availability of the archive to all U.S. high schools. To date, JSTOR has welcomed nearly forty schools from seventeen states as Charter Participants. Ronica Bhattacharya, Assistant Director for Library Relations, manages the outreach effort to the high schools and reports:

Response to our outreach efforts has been as enthusiastic as it has been informative. We are, at a certain level, still beginning to build an awareness about JSTOR in the community, and it is with great assistance from school librarians. While JSTOR has found its niche in research-oriented curriculum at this level, we continue to learn about the wide range of needs and resources in schools. Therefore, the excitement of building a Charter Participant group is quite equal to the prospect of being able, in the near future, to share what we're learning with the community at large.

Linda Mercer, librarian at The John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri, who contacted JSTOR during the pilot project and whose school has been a JSTOR participant since December 2002, says:

[JSTOR] is the type of resource - and engages the type of research skills - that our students will be using when they get to college and move on to graduate school. I believe it is resources like JSTOR . that give us the exciting opportunity to teach our kids how to effectively search and evaluate information. These are the tools they will be using in their lives and this is where we can have a positive influence on the quality of our students' ability to conduct research and synthesize its volume.

Participation information is available on our website at:

http://www.jstor.org/about/ss.index.html

Questions about the pilot project, or about participation in general, can be sent via email directly to Ronica Bhattacharya at:

ronicab@jstor.org

Last updated on September 8, 2006