Jstor: A History

Schonfeld, Roger C.

ISBN 10: 0691115311 / ISBN 13: 9780691115313

Published by Princeton University Press, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2003

About this Item

No marks or inscriptions. No creasing to covers or to spine. A lovely clean very tight copy with bright unmarked boards and no bumping to corners. Dust jacket not price clipped or marked or torn or creased. 412pp. The story of the development of one of the first, and most successful digital resources for storing the content of academic data, hardcopy books and journals. We do not use stock photos, the picture displayed is of the actual book for sale. Every one of our books is in stock in the UK ready for immediate delivery. Size: 9.5 x 6.25 inches. Seller Inventory # 017990

Bibliographic Details

Title: Jstor: A History

Publisher: Princeton University Press, Woodstock, Oxfordshire

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hard Cover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Ten years ago, most scholars and students relied on bulky card catalogs, printed bibliographic indices, and hardcopy books and journals. Today, much content is available electronically or online. This book examines the history of one of the first, and most successful, digital resources for scholarly communication, JSTOR. Beginning as a grant-funded project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the University of Michigan, JSTOR has grown to become a major archive of the backfiles of academic journals, and its own nonprofit organization.


Roger Schonfeld begins this history by looking at JSTOR's original mission of saving storage space and thereby storage costs, a mission that expanded immediately to improving access to the literature. What role did the University play? Could JSTOR have been built without the active involvement of a foundation? Why was it seen as necessary to "spin off" the project? This case study proceeds as an organizational history of the birth and maturation of this nonprofit, which had to emerge from the original university partnership to carve its own identity. How did the grant project evolve into a successful marketplace enterprise? How was JSTOR able to serve its twofold mission of archiving its journals while also providing access to them? What has accounted for its growth? Finally, Schonfeld considers implications of the economic and organizational aspects of archiving as well as the system-wide savings that JSTOR ensures by broadly distributing costs.

About the Author:

Roger C. Schonfeld is a research associate at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where his principal interests involve libraries and scholarly communications. He collaborated with James Shulman and William G. Bowen on "The Game of Life" (Princeton).