JSTOR: A History (review)

JSTOR began in late 1993 as the brainchild of William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and president emeritus of Princeton University. He hoped it would save libraries money by archiving journals, which would allow them to save space by discarding paper copies. (STOR stands for storage, not store.) More than a decade later, the library shelves are still full, but JSTOR has become indispensable—"addictive" according to one librarian—for research and teaching. Roger Schonfeld, a research associate at the Mellon Foundation, has written a detailed organizational history of JSTOR that explains how and why the project developed as it did.

JSTOR is organizationally complex. The Mellon Foundation initially worked through a grant with the University of Michigan, whose library school was active in research on digital technology for scholarly communication. It consulted with Elsevier, a commercial publisher of scholarly journals that was also working with Michigan on an electronic distribution project called TULIP (The University LIcensing Program). (Elsevier, frequently cast as a villain in the struggle over journal prices, was more than willing to share information and ideas.) As the project developed, a vendor came in to do scanning, OCR work, and indexing, and eventually a second vendor was added. Then, in 1995, JSTOR was incorporated as an independent not-for-profit organization. The next year it added a mirror site and production office at Princeton University and in 1998 a mirror site in the United Kingdom. The Mellon Foundation continued to be involved, in some cases giving grants to scholarly societies to fund the digitization of their publications for inclusion in JSTOR. Of course, the project had to work with the publishers of journals it wanted to include—commercial houses, university presses, and scholarly societies—and it had to negotiate with the libraries it hoped would subscribe.

If the organizational, legal, and financial dealings of JSTOR are complex, its technology is relatively simple. It therefore made sense for Schonfeld to concentrate on the management, planning, budgeting, and strategy of the organization. He had access to all of JSTOR's formal documents, memoranda, and informal notes, and he was able to interview all the participants, sometimes at length. His book provides a wealth of information that will be indispensable to those studying the development of online access to information. The massive detail made it difficult for Schonfeld to tell the story in an elegant narrative, however; the chapters overlap chronologically, and repetition and cross-references are frequent. Nevertheless, scholars will be glad that he chose to provide information and not try to write a page-turner.

Schonfeld mentions, but does not analyze, the ways in which technological change affected JSTOR. Even though the technology needed to create the digital archive was available in 1993, and software development was well under way, the growing enthusiasm for computers in academe shaped the project dramatically. When JSTOR began, the Worldwide Web was in its infancy and many people were betting on Gopher; few scholars in the humanities used e-mail or even had computers in their offices; CD-ROMs were the medium for archiving; online databases charged by minutes of use. JSTOR did not anticipate the expansion of the Web or the embrace of computers by academics. It was the customers—the librarians—who insisted on site licenses and who saw value, not in space saving, but in extended physical and intellectual access. The librarians, in turn, were responding to the demands of their customers—the faculty and students. And library budgets benefited from the stock-market boom of the 1990s, so that saving shelf space was a minor concern. As Schonfeld notes, "a scholarly resource that had been conceived amid constrained resources and tightening belts was of great interest for its searchability and desktop access, features that did not really save money" (p. 236).

It was also the customers who demanded that JSTOR expand its offerings far beyond the initial core collection, Arts and Sciences I. When JSTOR was envisioned as an archive of...