Perspectives
Our 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 and Art Journals
Eve Sinaiko
Director of Publications
College Art Association
The College Art Association has been publishing The Art Bulletin since 1912 and Art Journal since 1941. These quarterlies are the permanent record of our organization, venerable and respected publications of record in art history and theory.
Since 2000, we have had an agreement with JSTOR to include our back issues in the online archive. We were particularly honored and pleased to become part of the JSTOR family because the CAA journals were among the very first visual-arts publications invited to join the archive. At that time we already had some other online licenses, mostly for text-only versions of our publications. Like many other art publishers, we were interested in online archives but also understood that they presented some challenges, principally because our journals contain large numbers of reproductions of artworks and photographic images, many of which are still in copyright. CAA is sensitive to copyright concerns, because it represents not only art scholars—art historians, curators, critics, librarians—but also thousands of copyright owners, including working artists and graphic designers. In our discussions with JSTOR, we worked together to ensure that putting all of the issues of CAA journals online would comply with the requirements of copyright law, especially in the then-evolving area of electronic rights.
We were also aware that art scholarship was disappearing from the public discourse and from important research tools like JSTOR because of the hesitation of publishers to enter this brave new world. Our back issues became available on the JSTOR website in 2003, with a 3-year moving wall. We worked closely with JSTOR staff to ensure that the reproductions (especially color images) would have high resolution and book-quality presentation, but also to ensure that they would not be easily exportable or detachable from the journal page for unauthorized uses. Together we have outlined our partnership at several conferences, including the Visual Resources Association, the Art Libraries Association of North America, and CAA itself. The annual JSTOR publishers'; meeting has been, for the CAA publications staff, a consistently fruitful and informative event.
In the four years since we began participating, 97.3 % of our journals' back issues have been viewed in JSTOR. This percentage includes both participants from participating institutions and over 660 CAA members who access our back issues individually in JSTOR. These statistics alone would be welcomed by any publisher. But our relationship with JSTOR has evolved from just an archiving arrangement. We have developed a working partnership with the organization that has led, on JSTOR's side, to the inclusion of many additional art and visual-studies journals, often with our help and encouragement. On our side, JSTOR has served as an informal, but valuable advisor as we develop our own born-digital journal, caa.reviews. We have been able to draw on the expertise and advice of JSTOR staff to explore the issues of site design, licensing, data capture and migration, and preservation. caa.reviews is now nine years old, and we are currently in the planning stages for preserving the journal with Portico, a not-for-profit electronic archiving service as well as include it in JSTOR. Just as we were one of JSTOR's first archived art journals, we hope to be one of its first archived electronic-only journals.
As CAA approaches our centenary, we are exploring the next generation of digital publishing—including content with embedded moving images, audio, real-time reader forum, deep networking, social tagging, and other features possible only in the electronic realm. We look forward to continuing our partnership with JSTOR as we move into the future.