No. 10, Issue 1, JSTORNEWS, March 2006

Perspectives

Our new feature—Perspectives—asks members of our community to share their thoughts on the impact JSTOR is having at their institutions and organizations, on their campuses, and in their research.

JSTOR Becomes Mainstream at Northwestern

Jeffrey Garrett, Assistant University Librarian for Collection Management
Northwestern University, USA
JSTOR Participant since 1997

I was asked by JSTOR to contribute the first article for Perspectives after I shared with them a report that I had written for our library. Like others, we consider carefully our expenses and the benefits derived from resource investments for our campus. Northwestern's recent commitment to participate in the JSTOR Biological Sciences Collection will add one hundred titles to our JSTOR portfolio by 2007, bringing our total number of JSTOR-archived journals to over six hundred. What is the value to Northwestern of this increasing investment?

The answer depends in part on our community's use of JSTOR. Taking advantage of the configurable options available from the JSTOR Usage Statistics Site (http://stats.jstor.org/), JSTOR use can be measured in a variety of ways—number of pages viewed, number of download/pages printed, or number of article views per month. Consider growth of demand measured in article views for a typical month over the last nine years:

This rapid growth is impressive by any standard. We attribute it to a number of factors: the first is of course the steady growth in the number, diversity, and depth of JSTOR titles we can offer our community; the second factor is the outreach activities by public services librarians, bibliographers, and library public relations; and third, we can note the growing comfort level of our community with the electronic medium. We speculate that this rings true to varying degrees at other institutions as well. Northwestern's use of JSTOR compares well with that of our peers—these being the other 108 institutions that are in JSTOR's highest category, the so-called "very large" research universities, roughly equivalent to the Carnegie Endowment's "Research I" institutions.

Beyond these reasons, there was also a carefully planned large-scale transfer of most JSTOR print titles* from open stacks in Main Library to the Library Storage Facility (LSF) in 2003. We believe this led many more conservative members of our public to "gear up" and do something they had been intending to do all along, namely learn how to use JSTOR rather than hike up into the stacks. We doubt that anyone, looking back, has any regrets that they scaled this learning curve. We certainly have had no complaints—not a one.

Encouraged by our community's acceptance of JSTOR—and almost a total absence of demand for the print from the storage facility—we have also begun working with the Center for Research Libraries to support their Mellon-funded JSTOR print archive with runs from Northwestern. In a pilot conducted in spring 2005, we contributed the back runs of fifty-three journals and plan to provide another two hundred titles this summer. In some cases, these are Northwestern's only copies. JSTOR-archived journals not needed by CRL are being boxed and put into dark storage, also in the hope that they might be claimed someday by another JSTOR print archive in the U.S. or abroad. The shelf space we are gaining through this operation, both in the LSF and in our main stacks, will be measured in the thousands of linear feet. Circulation is already counting on the space in Main Library to ease crowding, and library units are lining up with projects to take advantage of the newly available space in the LSF.

So, what is JSTOR costing us? According to William G. Bowen's report to ARL directors from last December (http://www.arl.org/newsltr/243/bowen.html), the average cost per use is around twenty cents per article, where "use" is defined as article views and printings. At Northwestern, this figure was twelve cents per article for 2005. Bowen comments: "The value proposition seems clear—even without taking account of substantial savings in capital costs and operating costs, and without factoring in the gains in convenience and the time savings for users who enjoy instant access to journal content at any hour and from almost any location."

Is JSTOR valuable for us at Northwestern? Yes, without a doubt, and we expect this to continue. As a result of the enhanced access to our JSTOR collections through Google Scholar, we foresee another jump in the usage numbers for 2006—and even better amortization of this large but vitally important investment.

*Many art, architecture, and archaeology journals were excepted from this general move.