News

JSTOR and Artstor 2018 highlights

As 2018 comes to a close, we took a look at JSTOR and Artstor’s milestones. This year we:… Read more»

The JSTOR Understanding series: a new research tool on JSTOR

The JSTOR Understanding series (Beta) is a free research tool from JSTOR Labs that fosters student engagement with classic literature by connecting passages in primary texts with journal articles and book chapters on JSTOR that cite those lines.

Building on the success of the Understanding Shakespeare tool, the Understanding series encompasses several key works of British literature such as Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice, the King James Bible, as well as all Shakespeare sonnets and plays. These… Read more»

An initiative to learn how plants have shaped human societies

Plants offer remarkable opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR are collaborating to launch the Plant Humanities Initiative to foster this work through scholarly programming, the exploration of primary sources, and digital publication via a new scholarly research tool.

Head to the Scientific American blog to learn more about the initiative. There, Yota Batsaki, executive director of Dumbarton Oaks, and Alex Humphreys, director of JSTOR Labs and associate vice president of JSTOR, explore how to confront the considerable… Read more»

JSTOR and Apex CoVantage mark 20 years bringing academic research online

Today JSTOR, the global, non-profit digital library of thousands of journals, books, and primary sources, and Apex CoVantage (Apex), the innovative digitization and publishing solutions leader, mark the 20-year anniversary of their relationship. The organizations have pioneered the high-quality conversion of academic publications from analog to digital form, breathing new life into millions of pages of scholarly research dating back to the 1600s.

JSTOR was founded in the mid-1990s, initially as a grant-funded project from the Andrew W. Mellon… Read more»

Easier access to research tools on JSTOR

In addition essential academic content, JSTOR also includes a growing set of tools that can help researchers explore and use the content in novel ways. Now these resources are easily discoverable from a new “Tools” menu that appears on the top of every page on JSTOR.

The two resources currently available from this new menu are the award-winning Text Analyzer, a new way to search, and Data for Research, a service that enables researchers to define… Read more»

Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR to launch Plant Humanities Initiative

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides support for digital tool and research and scholarly programming

Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University, and JSTOR, the digital library for research and teaching that is part of the non-profit ITHAKA, are launching, with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Plant Humanities Initiative: a digital tool with related research and scholarly programming to advance the field of Plant Humanities. To this end, the Foundation has awarded JSTOR a… Read more»

JSTOR makes its Research Basics course easier to access

JSTOR has made its popular Research Basics course easier and simpler to access. Research Basics, a free and open online course designed to help early college and college-bound students learn academic research skills, was originally available as a Moodle course that required registration; it has now been moved to the LibGuides platform and the registration requirement removed.

Research Basics is not specific to JSTOR, but covers a range of key research skills broadly applicable to academic research.… Read more»

The top 10 most popular OA ebooks in JSTOR

JSTOR’s rapidly growing Open Access (OA) ebook program has proven so successful that our top three most-used ebooks overall are OA. Here are the top 10 most popular OA titles so far this year:… Read more»

Researching Baseball’s Cultural History Reinvented

Baseball has been a mainstay of American culture since the 1800s. Not only do millions watch games, myriad fans pore through player statistics, collect baseball cards, and immerse themselves in the game. And then there are those who make baseball their life’s work, delving into the sport’s history and its cultural and socio-economic impacts. Baseball historians do their work by heading into print and digital archives and sifting through materials, hoping to discover stories that have not yet… Read more»

Blurring Shakespeare with help from JSTOR Labs

Derek Miller’s project To Quote or Not to Quote features all of the Bard’s plays, but actors won’t be using it to memorize their lines. The professor of theater history at Harvard University has created a clear–yet blurry–visualization of how we cite the works of William Shakespeare. Using an API built by JSTOR Labs to calculate the number of times every line from every play has been cited in JSTOR, Miller makes the text look fuzzier the less often… Read more»