JSTOR has a long tradition of hosting meetings for our participating library constituency at the annual and mid-winter ALA conferences each year. In May, JSTOR hosted a similar meeting for its participating publishers in New York City. Facilitating a meeting for participating publishers is a natural extension of the system-wide perspective that JSTOR has taken in the creation, growth, and maintenance of the archive. Currently, JSTOR has more than 250 publishers providing over 400 journals to the 11 available JSTOR collections. This represents over 15 million pages of content in the archive.

This year's meeting included a half-day workshop for "new-to-JSTOR" publishers, in addition to a full-day participating publisher meeting. The half-day workshop focused on participating publisher resources, benefits, and programs provided by JSTOR. Members of JSTOR's Publishers Relations, User Services, and Technology Services units spoke on topics such as collection development, searching JSTOR, metadata sharing, and individual access. We were also very fortunate to have three participating publishers - Mary Rose Muccie of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; Elizabeth Weaver Engel of the American Political Science Association; and William Dahl from the Botanical Society of America - share their experiences in utilizing JSTOR benefits and programs to enhance and add value to the services they offer their society members.

The mix of attendees - publishers whose journals have been in JSTOR for several years and those who have just signed; small societies with one title and university presses with multiple titles in the archive - allowed for a useful exchange of views and ideas.

The success of the workshop was mirrored by the meeting the next day. More than 80 attendees were treated to a full day of provocative and informative sessions on topics ranging from discussions of outreach to the developing world, through new approaches to electronic publishing, and on to the creation of institutional repositories. Our speakers reflected the diversity of the scholarly publishing community (publishers, librarians, academics, administrators, practitioners) including William G. Thomas III, Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History; Christian Filstrup, Dean of Libraries at Stony Brook University; Daniel Greenstein, Associate Vice-Provost for Scholarly Information, University of California; and Carol A. Mandel, Dean of the Division of Libraries at New York University. A few presentations focused specifically on JSTOR initiatives: Nancy Kopans, General Counsel, spoke on the Amicus brief in Faulkner v. National Geographic Society; David Yakimischak, Chief Technical Officer, outlined JSTOR's strategies for interoperability; and Rahim Rajan, Assistant Director for International Library Relations, discussed JSTOR's activities in the developing world. As with the workshop, feedback was exceptionally positive.

If you'd like more information on the workshop or the meeting, please don't hesitate to contact Publisher Relations: pr@jstor.org

Last updated on September 8, 2006