Journal Storage by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

1916 Words4 Pages

Journal Storage is a digital library created by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1995, which is well known as JSTOR. The home page of JSTOR is www.jstor.org. The main language is English, it includes contents in other languages as well. The owner of JSTOR is now ITHAKA, which is a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 that has a mission of incubating promising new projects that support the use of technology for the benefit of higher education. It is built to contain digitized academic journals. It now also includes books and primary sources, and current issues of journals. Identification and description of JSTOR JSTOR was initiated at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. It was originally conceived to be a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence, especially academic libraries. Because most of the libraries found it expensive to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing journals, JSTOR could allow libraries to outsource the storage of these journals that they would remain available for the long term. JSTOR provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. More than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries have access to JSTOR; most access is by subscription, but some older public domain content is freely available to anyone. JSTOR improves its access based on the feedbacks from its initial web sites, and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. To make pictures and graphs clear and readable, special software was put in place. In 2012, JSTOR launched a program providing individual scholars and researchers who register it limited no cost ... ... middle of paper ... ...st journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall," which is an agreed-upon delay between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually three to five years. Publishers can request that the period be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. So patrons may not be able to find current articles. And it is the limitation of JSTOR. I really like the interface of JSTOR, especially the fonts, symbols and images. The layout is very welcome. It’s neat and helpful. There are tutorials and search helps guiding patrons how to use it. So I think it is a good academic digital library.

Open Document