No. 10, Issue 3, JSTORNEWS, October 2006

Introducing the JSTOR-ARTstor Search Prototype

On September 28, 2006, we released the JSTOR-ARTstor Search Prototype. This is the first technological collaboration between our organizations aimed at advancing and enriching the work of scholars and students. ARTstor contains hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data, and the JSTOR archive has over 20 million pages of historical journal issues online. Users now have the opportunity to experiment with mining both repositories together, searching articles, book reviews, opinion pieces, images, drawings, and illustrations, all in a matter of seconds.

Will this be valuable to users? We are eager to hear their feedback. From our perspective, it may be useful to art and architectural historians and others that base their research on the study of images. We expect it will also be valuable to researchers working in other disciplines (history and geography, for example) and to teachers and students looking for context. Two examples demonstrate the breadth of coverage: Searching 'Yosemite' finds 3000 articles and 49 images published in articles in JSTOR, as well as over 200 images of Yosemite (including drawings and illustrations) available in ARTstor.

The design of the service is also important. At the moment, after searching JSTOR and ARTstor simultaneously, users can view three sets of tabbed search results: one for articles and other related textual content in JSTOR, one for images published within articles in JSTOR, and one for images found in ARTstor. Users at institutions that participate in ARTstor see thumbnail images as part of the search results and can link directly to ARTstor to view the full-size images. What might improve this from a user perspective? Ideally, how do users want to navigate the search results and the content? Do needs vary by aim or by discipline?

We have made JSTOR-ARTstor Search available as a prototype on the JSTOR Sandbox (http://sandbox.jstor.org/). The Sandbox is a site recently launched to allow users at participating institutions to preview and provide feedback on website innovations and functionality that may eventually be added to the main JSTOR website. The Sandbox is a space for experimentation, and we plan to add future features as we develop them. Currently, we are trying out several additional search enhancements in the Sandbox (limiting search to specific disciplines in the Basic Search, and allowing for queries across multiple fields in the Advanced Search, such as article author and article title together).

We encourage users at participating institutions to visit the Sandbox and to "play." We are eager and awaiting your comments or suggestions. For more information, please visit http://artstor-sandbox.jstor.org/search/.