As part of JSTOR's ongoing efforts to provide the best possible experience for our users, we recently commissioned a survey of faculty members in the United States to learn more about their use of various library resources, including JSTOR. This survey followed up on a similar study that we commissioned in 2000. Three years later, we felt the time was right to update what we learned then and to ask for additional feedback about the faculty user experience with JSTOR.

Faculty members across all disciplines included in the JSTOR archive were asked to participate. The response that we received — 7,400 faculty members took the time to complete the twenty page survey — was invaluable. We are grateful for their views, and are pleased to highlight a few of the most interesting.

Archiving and Preservation

Archiving continues to be a major concern among faculty members. They view electronic archiving as an increasing imperative, with some 83% saying that it is "crucial" that their published research be protected (up nearly ten percentage points in three years). Yet in some ways, their answers exhibit confusion about the effects and implications of preservation and acquisitions choices. For example, a clear majority say it would be "fine with me" if current print issues were discontinued, yet when discussing existing print backfiles, only about 20% would be "happy" to part with them. These results suggest a strong desire for stability and the assured longevity of material, but also acknowledge with the benefits of electronic access.

We continue to try to educate our users about preservation issues. We are making progress on our preservation initiatives, including our efforts to archive "born digital" materials through our collaboration with the Electronic Archiving Initiative.

More Content

Of faculty members aware of JSTOR, 45% agree that "JSTOR does not provide adequate coverage of journals in my field," while 55% agree that "JSTOR needs to expand the number of journals it offers before it can be a truly valuable resource." Based on that feedback, which echoed a similar sentiment in the 2000 survey, we have been working hard to expand the number of journal titles. Since the 2003 survey was completed, we have announced the creation of two new collections: Arts & Sciences IV and the Arts & Sciences Complement. We are also at work on a collection focused in the biological sciences. It is our hope that over the next four years, we will roughly double the number of journal titles that are available to faculty at participating institutions today.

Access to Current Issues

Faculty members would like to have easier access to current issues through the JSTOR interface. While most journals in the archive exclude the most recent three to five years of content (the moving wall), a priority for JSTOR is to include links to current content when possible. Already we provide outbound links for twenty-eight titles that offer their current issues through Project Muse, and we are investigating scalable ways to provide this type of "current issues linking" to a broader set of titles in JSTOR.

Better Searching

Finally, we received a number of criticisms of the current search experience on JSTOR. This was no surprise to us, as JSTOR's Technology Services and User Services teams have been working this year to rebuild JSTOR's underlying search engine in order to improve the user search experience dramatically. Internal testing of the new search features is completed and we have just recently asked our participating institutions and publishers to review the new search capabilities and provide us with feedback. Features such as a much faster search engine, relevance ranking of results, and "search all" — where users can search all the content in the archive, as opposed to the current discipline-specific searching — are just a few of the enhancements that we look forward to making available in the near future.

In addition to the few findings discussed here, the survey has also given us a number of ideas for future developments to improve the availability and accessibility of the JSTOR archive. We believe that asking users for their honest feedback about their environment, as well as about their experiences with JSTOR, is the best way to improve the archive for the scholarly community.

Last updated on September 8, 2006