JSTOR Music Collection (review)

Introduction

JSTOR has become the go-to source for library users looking for quick and easy access to online, full-text music journal articles, but what are users getting when they search JSTOR? What are they missing? JSTOR's mission is to "work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources."¹ In 2001 RILM Abstracts of Music Literature identified a need for full-text indexing of music journals.² RILM wrote a successful Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to prepare a list of music titles for JSTOR and worked with music "scholars and members of the Music Library Association" to develop journal collection content.³ JSTOR and RILM's partnership came to fruition in 2003 and the JSTOR Music Collection was born.

More recently, in 2009, JSTOR joined ITHAKA, a non-for-profit group whose umbrella includes ITHAKA S+R, JSTOR, and Portico.⁴ ITHAKA S+R offers strategic consulting services and has compiled research on the role of the library in the digital age, practices and attitudes in scholarly communications, and teaching and learning with technology, amongst other topics.⁵ This research complements JSTOR's mission of preserving scholarship and maintaining an integral role with scholars and librarians. Today over 7,000 institutions subscribe to JSTOR worldwide and its breadth includes content from over 817 publishers.⁶

Scope

The JSTOR Music Collection contains thirty-three leading titles in the field of musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, and music education.⁷ Titles available in the JSTOR Music Collection are also included in a subscription to the Arts and Sciences III collection. Date coverage spans from 1844 to 2011. Much of the content is in English but German, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Dutch are also represented in journal coverage.

Not every journal title listed in the database is archived in JSTOR. There are four different access levels:

1. 1. "You have access to this content." These articles are archived within JSTOR and one's library subscription grants one access to these titles.

2. 2. "You have access to part of this content." These journals have a "moving wall" period in which the latest volumes of the journal are not yet archived. They will be archived within JSTOR once they pass the moving wall period.

3. 3. "Full text on external site." This content is indexed within JSTOR but one must follow the link to the publisher's site to access the full-text article.

4. 4. "Citation access." Patrons can see the citation but if the institution does not subscribe to the particular package containing the content, they will be unable to access the full text.

Citation access proves problematic as JSTOR does not provide the opportunity to link using an OpenURL link resolver. Therefore, the library may have full-text access or a print subscription to the content but the patron will not be able to locate it without some detective work on their library's Web site or by using interlibrary loan. Worse yet, less savvy library users may be fooled into believing they need to purchase the full text of an article using the "purchase article" option that appears within JSTOR. Users rely on OpenURL link resolvers. It is hoped that JSTOR will consider providing an OpenURL linking option in the future when increasing citation-only access.

JSTOR also includes some e-books from University Presses at Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, and Yale. In March, JSTOR announced new partnerships to add e-books from University Presses at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and California.⁸ This service will become more and more valuable as libraries continue to increase their e-book holdings and users begin reading more books online.

Searching

JSTOR offers a basic search option and an advanced search option. The basic search functions similar to the single search box users are...