In the December 2002 issue of OED News, the newsletter of the Oxford English Dictionary, a news item entitled "Mining the Web" included the following description of JSTOR. The complete version of the article and the newsletter are available online at: http://dictionary.oed.com/public/news/0212.htm

JSTOR: The Origins of Scientific Literature

JSTOR documents a much more formal type of writing: scholarly articles published in academic journals and periodicals. Publications held on JSTOR are drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, social and natural sciences, with titles including the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Family Planning Perspectives, and the Slavonic Year-Book.

The oldest journal on JSTOR, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dates back to 1665. Given this early starting date, it is perhaps no surprise that JSTOR has provided some important antedatings. Recent examples include Newtonian (antedated to 1676 from 1713), nucleus (1668 from 1708), and molecule (1701 from 1794).

JSTOR has also been useful in documenting the emergence of more recent words and expressions (it seems that many everyday terms started life in academic literature). The adjectives caffeinated, benchmarked, and off-peak, and the nouns child-minding, multiculturalism, and comfort zone are all examples of recent additions to the OED which currently have first quotations from JSTOR sources.

Thanks for making TIFFs available for low-vision users. It may be expensive and inconvenient for you, to benefit a small number of users, but we're out here, and it is heart-warming to find that I can read the material in your archive.

I have just received my copy of JSTORNEWS, no. 7, issue 2. I share the feelings expressed by JSTOR users in the Comments section. If asked, I would comment as follows: "As a small institute with limited space and funds, it is comforting to know that we have our very 'own' scholarly journals collection right here in our PCs."

Last updated on September 8, 2006