No. 10, Issue 3, JSTORNEWS, October 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.

Extreme JSTOR

Roger Bagnall
Professor of Classics and History
Columbia University

It's easier to use JSTOR than to go to some distant stacks or ask for a volume from an off-campus repository. So we hear from earlier "Perspectives" columns. But suppose that those aren't your choices. Suppose that the nearest possible source for a journal run is 500 miles away, or in another country. JSTOR comes into my life most of all when I'm in Egypt, where it is sometimes the only source for articles from major journals.

Each year, from January to March, I run a Columbia University program in Egypt. In January, the students (who come from other institutions as well as Columbia) take a seminar on the oases of Egypt, taught in our mud-brick excavation house in the Dakhleh Oasis (in Egypt's western desert, 200 miles from Luxor and 500 miles from Cairo). In February, we excavate a town site called Amheida in this oasis. The students spend March in Aswan, Luxor, Cairo, and Alexandria, seeing sites and museums. They give presentations in the seminar and before visiting sites. During the excavation, the exhausted team members try during the evenings to make sense of what they're finding.

We do have a library in the oasis, actually—about 350 volumes of reference works and monographs on architecture and various types of small finds, and literature on the archaeology and history of Egypt, especially in the Graeco-Roman period. We box the library up in metal every year so that termites won't eat it while we're gone. We don't have journal runs. What happens when a student is preparing a seminar talk on the administration of Roman Egypt and needs an article from the Journal of Roman Studies? JSTOR. But one has to be patient, because we have only a dialup connection—we haven't managed yet to get through all of the bureaucratic layers necessary to get the DSL that is supposedly available. The line cuts off sometimes. The last two days of the season this year we had no connection because someone stole several hundred meters of the main phone line.

Still, most of the time we do have dialup. And so we have JSTOR, a little lumbering, but there. We would like it to contain a lot more archaeological journals, please. But it's our nearest equivalent to a research library; that and the History E-Book Project, thanks to the fact that we can log in to Columbia from what was once the remotest corner of the Roman empire. The program has been operating only since 2004; I have no idea what we would have done in pre- JSTOR times. Archaeologists generally waited till they got home to look at the journal literature; nowadays we can begin to think about our finds and compare them to other material while they're still in front of us; the field and the library are not two disjoined places to the same extent.

Even in Cairo, for that matter, JSTOR is the lifesaver. I taught at the American University in Cairo in the fall of 2004. AUC's library is that of a liberal arts college, not of a research university. It doesn't have much depth in periodicals, and because it lacks a Classics department, it doesn't have many journals about antiquity. Some of them can be found in the libraries of various foreign or religious institutes sprinkled around the city. But that takes a lot of time, and not all of them are there either. Egypt has no great research library—the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a great building, but also at best the collection of a college. In teaching I found constantly that electronic journals were the only way to get the articles my students needed. Fortunately for them, AUC participates in JSTOR. But so far no other Egyptian university does. I know from working with Egyptian graduate students how frustrating this is for them. The potential impact of wider access to JSTOR in developing countries is enormous, and the Open Africa initiative, which I hope will bring this marvelous resource to other Egyptian universities, is a wonderful and generous move. It will help to transform teaching in Egypt and many other countries for more than the privileged few.