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August 14, 2017

ITHAKA at the European e-Accessibility Forum

What lessons did we learn in making JSTOR accessible to people with disabilities? And what challenges now lie in making Artstor, a resource steeped in visual art, more thoroughly accessible? This summer, Lauren Trimble, ITHAKA’s User Advocacy & Accessibility Specialist, presented "From Text to Art: Building Accessibility into the JSTOR and Artstor Digital Archives" at the 11th European e-Accessibility Forum. Lauren outlined JSTOR’s process of adopting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to make our archive accessible, and she described the rich possibilities ITHAKA faces as it draws Artstor into a higher level of conformance. Read more

August 11, 2017

A smart take on smartphones from JSTOR Daily

A recent piece in The Atlantic highlighted the negative social and mental health effects smartphones are having on American teens. Not so fast, says Alexandra Samuel, JSTOR Daily’s tech columnist. Samuel shifts the focus to the effects of smartphone culture on another generation—the parents of those teens. The story is being cited in the New York Times, Slate, and elsewhere around the web. Sign up to receive more stories like these–with fully accessible JSTOR research–every week… Read more

August 3, 2017

Scientific American now available in JSTOR

JSTOR now offers the complete run of Scientific American from 1845 to 2012, with new content to be added each year. Scientific American is included in the JSTOR Life Sciences collection, where it joins more than 150 other esteemed publications. The addition of Scientific American expands JSTOR’s coverage of a broad range of scientific fields, and will additionally benefit interdisciplinary researchers working across the humanities and social sciences. Read more

August 1, 2017

JSTOR’s new look–
now easier to search and browse

You may have noticed that JSTOR has become easier to use. That’s because we recently rolled out a new visual design that enhances the searching and browsing experience, and clarifies access options. The functionality you’ve come to expect remains the same, and the redesigned interface now features: A search box at the top of every page to help you find the content you need Larger fonts, brighter color, and navigation aids to provide a consistent experience Optimized headers and… Read more

June 28, 2017

NEH highlights JSTOR’s Arabic-Language Digitization Project

A new article by the National Endowment for the Humanities highlights JSTOR’s Arabic-Language Digitization Project. The author details the recent 2017 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant in support of JSTOR’s plan for the digitization of Arabic-language scholarly journals, explaining the challenges that have faced previous efforts and the urgency of such a project. Read the article on the NEH website. Read more

June 12, 2017

“Reimagining the Digital Monograph” white paper released

The JSTOR Labs team has released the final version version of “Reimagining the Digital Monograph,” a free white paper that addresses community-driven research and makes recommendations for improving the user experience of digital monographs. The draft version of the paper was released for public comment in December 2016 along with Topicgraph, a prototype visualization tool for a set of open access monographs. The final version of the paper includes detailed… Read more

June 6, 2017

White paper notes high demand of open access ebooks on JSTOR

A white paper released by Cornell University Press reviewing their NEH Humanities Open Book Program notes exceptionally high levels of discovery and usage on JSTOR. The paper states that the 20 titles Cornell University Press is making available on JSTOR saw a total of more than 15,000 chapter downloads in less than six months—more than in all the other platforms in which they make the ebooks available combined. JSTOR currently partners with 14 leading publishers to make more than 550 open… Read more

June 1, 2017

Digital preservation service Portico welcomes its 1,000th library

Portico, ITHAKA’s digital preservation service, welcomed the University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany as its 1,000th participant this month. The Library is one of 53 German institutions that joined following an exhaustive evaluation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), which recommended participation in Portico as part of their national strategy for digital preservation of licensed content. Read more

May 17, 2017

JSTOR and AAAS further expand access to Science

JSTOR and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are pleased to announce they have renewed their longstanding agreement to preserve and make available over 100 years of Science via the JSTOR platform. JSTOR and AAAS first began working together in 1998 when Science was among the earliest journals converted from print to digital form by JSTOR. For nearly 20 years, JSTOR has hosted issues of Science dating back to 1880 – more than 480,000 pages of content in total, covering everything from electricity to genomics. JSTOR makes the journal available through several of its collections to libraries around the world, where it can be used by students and researchers working across a wide array of disciplines. With this new agreement, JSTOR and the AAAS renew their commitment to ensuring access to this long history of scientific research and to continuing to add new issues of Science to JSTOR each year. Read more

March 29, 2017

JSTOR receives $50,000 NEH grant

Today, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced funding for 208 humanities projects, including a $50,000 grant to JSTOR to support research on the high-quality digitization and digital preservation of Arabic-language scholarly journals. JSTOR’s NEH-funded research will include the development of digitization and indexing guidelines for Arabic-language scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, the digitization of a small test run of Arabic-language scholarly journal issues, and an assessment of the cost, quality, and feasibility of the digitization… Read more