Libraries with a mission to archive material for future generations are charged not just with taking care of older literature, but also with taking the steps to preserve new literature as it is published. For journals, this not only means cataloguing and shelving new issues as they come through the door, but also, with the passage of time, binding issues into volumes to protect them from wear and tear and arranging for their storage and retrieval. Preserving journals in the JSTOR archive involves a similar practice. For each publication, JSTOR digitizes the back run one time, but with each passing year new volumes are added to the archive with a "flip" of the moving wall. Selected by publishers and typically ranging from three to five years, the moving wall defines the gap between coverage in JSTOR and the most recently published volume of a journal. For example, for journals with three-year moving walls, JSTOR presently displays content through the year 2000 issues. The moving wall allows JSTOR to provide our library participants and their constituents with a reliable archive of material, while not jeopardizing our participating publishers' current content revenue streams.

Adding content to JSTOR with each moving wall "update," however, involves more than a simple "flip of the switch." The sheer amount of material released every year as part of the moving wall update is quite substantial. Our first update, completed in January 1998, comprised just 40 volumes. The January 2004 moving wall update included 1,157 volumes and 288,554 pages – the equivalent of re-releasing the complete back run of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1854-1905), plus the entire back runs of all seven art and architectural titles added to the archive in November 2003. In terms of physical library space, this represents 30 linear feet. Despite the scale and complexity of the moving wall update, our goal is for it to be completely seamless for all of the libraries, faculty, students, and researchers using the archive. This requires a great deal of planning within JSTOR.

The process starts in late spring/early summer with our Production unit ensuring that we have the printed versions of all of the journal issues that are to be released. We then concentrate on getting any issues not already digitized ready for scanning and indexing. Approximately four to six weeks later, once this process is complete, JSTOR's Production staff checks the resulting files for accuracy and completeness. One area among many that increasingly requires special attention is encoding and transliteration of non-Latin alphabetic content in the JSTOR metadata.

With the accuracy of the electronic files verified, they are released to JSTOR internal users for further testing. Testers in our User Services unit look over a sample of titles and articles to make sure everything appears properly in the JSTOR interface, that our journal coverage notes have been appropriately updated to include the newly released journal issues, and that those new issues are actually accessible through our public user interface. Once internal testing is complete, our Systems group actually copies into public view all of the new content. This involves mirroring the new content to a number of servers distributed in the United States and the United Kingdom. Careful coordination is required, so as not to interfere with user access in the different time zones represented by JSTOR participating libraries.

Each moving wall update is a significant event that is paramount in our efforts to build and maintain the scholarly archive. Moreover, as time goes by, the annual moving wall update has become even more important to our participating institutions. As one librarian noted in our 2002 Bound Volume survey, "JSTOR gives us flexibility for the future."
We see this in library activities and in the cost savings libraries are beginning to realize from this effort. A growing number of librarians have begun relying on JSTOR and the moving wall to make decisions about binding and shelf space on a going-forward basis. When we surveyed librarians in 2003 about their binding and preservation practices, 33% of respondents said that because of JSTOR, they had already stopped binding recent issues, and 23% indicated they had moved bound volumes of titles included in JSTOR to remote storage. As budgets tighten, JSTOR's secure and accessible archive provides library administrators with reliable choices in making decisions about how best to utilize their limited monetary and spatial resources.

The results of the 2003 Bound Volume Surveys are available at:

http://www.jstor.org/about/bvs2003.html

Last updated on September 8, 2006