Among JSTOR's participating publishers are many learned societies, small independent publishing operations, and editors that publish journals within their university departments. These organizations, and the people behind them, play a vital role in scholarly research and are often the forces behind the most highly-cited journals in their fields. While the Internet offers new ways for them to increase awareness of their work and to broaden the readership and exposure of their authors, making the most of technology can require significant time, effort, and resources.

As a small step toward this goal, JSTOR recently developed a way to help publishers enable researchers to browse the tables of contents for the back issues of their journals on their organizations' websites. Many already display the table of contents and articles for their current issues, but they rarely have the past material available. Gathering and formatting the tables of contents information, for what in some cases is more than one hundred years of material, requires substantial work. JSTOR already has this information captured in the form of metadata, and we are now able to offer it to our participating publishers in an "easy to use" HTML format.

Metadata is the bibliographic information about the contents of a journal captured by JSTOR during the digitization process. This bibliographic information is present at the journal, issue, and article levels, and includes such data as the journal title, ISSN, publisher, copyright, volume and issue numbers, article title, article author(s), and SICI links (stable URLs). Traditionally, JSTOR has exported metadata in XML format to publishers. In order to use the metadata, however, publishers must first process the XML into a functional format. Options include loading metadata into a database or transforming it into HTML for viewing in a web browser.

Because some publishers do not have the capacity or necessary expertise to process the XML into a usable format, JSTOR developed the HTML Export. The HTML Export is ready-made for display on a publisher's website. It contains one HTML page with a list of all issues ("Journal TOC") and, for every issue, a complete table of contents including stable article-level links to JSTOR ("Issue TOC"). We also provide a cascading style sheet so publishers can easily manipulate the color, font size, etc. without having to edit the HTML itself.

A number of publishers have already taken advantage of the new HTML Export package. Earlier this year, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) used it to place the table of contents and article links of their journal Hesperia on their website (http://hesperiaonline.org/). The ASCSA also participates in JSTOR's Individual Access Program. This allows individual subscribers to Hesperia to follow the links and use their JSTOR username and password to access the full-text articles. Users at JSTOR participating institutions that encounter the links also have access to the articles. Charles Watkinson, Director of Publications at the ASCSA, describes how JSTOR's HTML Export benefits their readers:

JSTOR is pleased to be able to offer our participating publishers the metadata for their digitized journals. Should the HTML or XML Export be of interest, please contact JSTOR Publisher Relations at pr@jstor.org.

Last updated on September 8, 2006