Ford Foundation Grantees

Aligarh Muslim University | Aligarh, India American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) | Colombo, Sri Lanka Central Institute of English & Foreign Languages | Hyderabad, India Centre for Development Studies | Trivandrum, India Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences | Calcutta, India Centre for the Study of Culture and Society | Bangalore, India Centre for the Study of Developing Societies | Delhi, India Centre for Women's Development Studies | New Delhi, India Himal Association (Social Science Baha) | Lalitpur, Nepal Institute for Social and Economic Change | Bangalore, India Institute of Development Studies | Jaipur, India Institute of Economic Growth | Delhi, India Jadavpur University | Calcutta, India Jamia Milia University | New Dehli, India Jawaharlal Nehru University | New Delhi, India Madras Institute of Development Studies | Chennai, India Madras School of Economics | Chennai, India National Institute of Design | Ahmedabad, India National Law School of India University | Bangalore, India SNDT Women's University of Mumbai | Mumbai, India Tata Institute of Social Sciences | Mumbai, India University of Colombo | Colombo, Sri Lanka University of Hyderabad | Hyderabad, India University of Mysore | Mysore, India University of Peradeniya | Peradeniya, Sri Lanka University of Pune | Pune, India

JSTOR has been expanding its presence in South Asia since 2003. India alone now has sixty participating institutions and currently has the largest number of JSTOR participants in that part of the world.

The primary catalyst for growth in participation in this region was a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation to support JSTOR access at twenty institutions across India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. "JSTOR is a resource of vital use to scholars in the social sciences and the humanities who, more so than scholars in other fields in the region, lack deep and systematic access to information and content contained in some of the world's leading journals." says Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Program Officer for Education, Arts, and Culture at the Ford Foundation.

JSTOR's Library Relations and User Services teams have, for the Ford-sponsored project, worked very closely with participating institutions to make sure they understand the full value of the archive and how they can utilize JSTOR to improve awareness and use of electronic resources amongst their faculty and student populations—even if these constituencies do not yet have access to computers beyond campus borders. These efforts have paid off, as seen most dramatically in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose usage has steadily increased since gaining access to the archive in May 2004.

In early 2004, email, mail, and telephone communications from Library Relations staff and from Dr .Ramaswamy guided each Ford grantee through the JSTOR network performance test and licensing process. Concurrently, JSTOR User Services staff established a special website for the grantees. This website continues to provide contact information for each institution, as well as useful background resources and an informational section designed to give librarians ideas for promoting electronic resources.

In the summer of 2004, JSTOR Library Relations and User Services staff contacted each Ford Foundation grantee and invited them to participate in one of four regional training workshops, to be held in India later that autumn. "In some cases, we had to call grantees (late at night on the East Coast, but afternoon in India) to explain the vision and purpose of the workshop," says Rahim S. Rajan (Collection Development Manager, Aluka and formerly at JSTOR), "Ensuring that the grantee institutions could make effective use of the archive was of paramount importance. Simply enabling access to a digital scholarly archive like JSTOR wasn't sufficient—effective training, building institutional capacity, and educating these institutions about JSTOR's history and mission were also vital.

Mr. Rajan continues "Our experiences in South Asia also highlight the need for community participation and involvement, as part of an effort to ensure access to the archive over the long term in South Asia. By encouraging the grantees to attend regional workshops in four cities throughout India, we were able to assemble a diverse group of librarians and scholars to share experiences on how each institution was taking advantage of access to JSTOR. The workshops provided the librarians and scholars with a much-needed forum to exchange ideas and recognize the importance of working together to ensure optimal use of JSTOR on their campuses.

In October and November of 2004, Stephanie Krueger (Assistant Director, International Library Relations, JSTOR) and Mr. Rajan traveled to India to conduct training workshops. These were held in four different cities—New Delhi, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata—in order to reach as many librarians and scholars as possible. There were two key objectives for the workshops: (a) to build a sense of "community" amongst the grantees in South Asia, and (b) to increase the librarians' and scholars' familiarity with an electronic resource like JSTOR. "We really wanted to make sure that grantees understood from the beginning that JSTOR is a collaborative project designed to serve the international library community," says Ms. Krueger. "Many grantees had not even heard of JSTOR, let alone ever used the archive, before our seminars."

With the encouragement of Dr. Ramaswamy, the JSTOR workshops were also opened up to librarians from universities participating in the Indian government's University Grants Commission/Inflibnet project to provide an opportunity for them to become acquainted with JSTOR. In the span of two weeks, Ms. Krueger and Mr. Rajan successfully trained over eighty librarians, faculty members, and students from research and academic institutions in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

Each two-day workshop was unique. The general level of familiarity with electronic resources and JSTOR varied considerably from one workshop to the next. However, each gathering provided a forum for addressing, in person, any questions or concerns the librarians and scholars had about participation in the grant or about their institution's long-term financial commitment to participating in JSTOR. It also allowed for frank discussions about technical issues, including concerns grantees had about network performance tests or their institution's network configurations. One institution that had previously failed the network performance tests prior to the workshop was happy to hear at the event that they would now be able to participate in the JSTOR project.

Since these workshops, JSTOR's User Services and Library Relations staff has continued to work closely with grantee institutions to answer questions, provide them with promotional materials, explain the transition to the new JSTOR developing nations model, and give advice for training sessions librarians now conduct on their own. Librarians such as Sampath Perrera (University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka) and Madhu K.S. (National Law School of India University, India) have been in frequent contact with JSTOR staff. As Mr. Madhu recently noted: "We are really grateful to JSTOR for giving us more journals. Most of our students and faculty members are using the archive." A part of JSTOR's dual mission is to extend access to the archive as broadly as possible, and JSTOR partners and participants around the world continue to work towards that goal.

Last updated on September 8, 2006