Book reviews

JSTOR - a History

Roger Schonfeld, Princeton University Press, 2003

Official histories make unlikely page-turners. In their efforts to record faithfully every board meeting, every memo, every item of expenditure, the authors of such works usually manage to wring out any possible enjoyment from the story. The story of JSTOR should be dull indeed: a committee-based initiative for the academic community does not sound over-exciting. Yet JSTOR – a History is rather different; it makes for an inspiring read,

Why is the success of JSTOR so important? It should be remembered that JSTOR's very existence was unexpected. Academic institutions would almost certainly never have come up with a similar initiative of their own accord. Harvard University had the idea of digitising all its journals – but not with the intention of sharing the result. JSTOR was initially funded by a trust, but has now moved to a position of autonomy and self-sustainability. This is all the more remarkable in that neither foundations nor universities (JSTOR's main customer) are skilled at operational management (or at becoming self-sustaining).

Although JSTOR is clearly one of the most valuable resources for information retrieval in higher education, its value to academia was by no means clearly understood at the outset. At least a year after JSTOR's launch, Kevin Guthrie, the CEO of JSTOR, believed the organisation's biggest selling point was that it freed up shelf space for other books – not the digital access and powerful full-text searching the resource provides.

What makes the book unusually interesting is that the author provides sometimes startling amounts of information, a no-holds-barred approach that reveals the wrong, as well as the right, decisions, listing for example the publishers who chose not to work with JSTOR (Elsevier, who chose to create Science Direct, Macmillan, publishers of Nature ) as well as those who said yes. In this way, the author makes us feel caught up in the decisions, and, to a large extent, the partial knowledge, of the time. We see all the messy details of a new venture finding its way: at the end of its first year of operation, JSTOR had a revenue of only 60% of budget, while costs were 13% above budget. Any business start-up will sympathize with such figures, although not all have had JSTOR's patient and understanding backers.

The JSTOR business model was clearly not perfected from day one: the management team stumbled towards the model that exists today. Some key features were correct from the start (an online service, rather than CD-ROM-based), but others were only reached after trial and error. As Kevin Guthrie (who wrote the business model for JSTOR) put it, “During the planning process, non-profit leaders need to think less in terms of what their organization must do and more in terms of what they realistically can do” Some of the fascinating details revealed by this study include:

•  Although one or two libraries had considered creating archives of digital versions of journals for their own use, no other organisation had seen the benefit of providing such an archive to the academic community as a whole. No commercial or academic organisation would have created what JSTOR achieved.

•  It took some years for the organisation to manage the text capture process efficiently. It required not only operational management skills to handle the throughput of content with the keyboarding agencies. In addition, it only became clear after the process had started that the print journal collections of most university libraries are incomplete. It required considerable resourcefulness to track down all the copies (remarkably, some publishers were vague even about what had been published, for example during wartime).

•  JSTOR initially planned to digitise content from microfilm copies, but this idea was soon abandoned. UMI (the market leader in microfilming of journals) refused to work with JSTOR, despite repeated approaches – if you are the biggest player in a market, it doesn't make commercial sense to partner.

•  Elsevier created its own digital article delivery service, Science Direct, rather than collaborating. Nonetheless, JSTOR's approach shows that a curated bundle from several publishers can be in many ways more valuable than a collection from a single publisher.

•  Behind JSTOR is a guarantee that the archived copies will be available in perpetuity. Unlike other initiatives such as CLOCKS, JSTOR now has the resources to ensure that this guarantee can be fulfilled. Because of this, libraries are happy to purchase digital content that they have already bought in print form.

•  In passing, the book reveals the inequitable nature of most interlibrary loans (“the non archivers (i.e. non-archiving libraries) can inter-library loan virtually anything from the archivers at any time. To do so, they pay only the direct cost of the loan ... and contribute nothing towards the cost of acquisition or the capital and operational costs of archiving.”

The book reveals a pragmatic, and by no means unblemished record of project management. The JSTOR team made a series of what the author calls “presumptively optimal choices”, in other words, guessing the process was going to be easy, only to discover it was not.

In the course of this narrative, the author reveals revealing details about business models for educational publishing. For example, JSTOR resisted being set up as an offshoot of any single US university because, as Schonfeld delicately puts it, “in the good-natured competitive spirit that has served American higher education so well, if JSTOR belonged to one university library, would other libraries resist paying fees to subscribe?”

Why has JSTOR been so successful that it is now a household name among students on both sides of the Atlantic?

•  Although JSTOR captures journals for the academic community, it doesn't capture everything. JSTOR chooses a small proportion of the available journals and creates specific subject-based collections.

•  JSTOR was a collective initiative, rather than the implementation of a single person's vision. Although Kevin Guthrie wrote the JSTOR business plan, the success seems to have been a combination of the Mellon Foundation's vision, and a pragmatic management team.

•  JSTOR appeared at the right place and the right time: JSTOR's collections are essentially built around a host of non-commercial, not-for-profit journals that had reputation but that lacked commercial awareness.

•  “JSTOR's experience demonstrates that, while few libraries were willing to pay for archiving alone, they were willing to pay for access, collection-building, and space savings.”

•  JSTOR is not primarily about space-saving for libraries – library budgets almost never include capital costs of building and maintaining space. Only 22% of libraries removed hard copies as a result of JSTOR.

•  JSTOR's business model had to be a benefit to all parties: to the publishers, the libraries, and to the end users.

There are a few criticisms. The book is too long, at over 150,000 words, and with over 300 pages documenting the first five years of a committee-based digital initiative. But, as can be seen from the examples above, the wealth of well-researched details make this anything but a bland official history. There is no question the book is extensively researched –every statement has an attribution, and, remarkably, the presentations for every JSTOR board meeting, and every email from the time when the events took place, seem to have been preserved. To the author's credit, the story is far from a collective pat on the back to all concerned.

A more fundamental problem is the author's attempt to impose a thematic rather than a chronological arrangement. The result at times is a confusion of multiple perspectives that is anything but clear to follow - a more straightforward chronological approach would have been much clearer:

“This may have been impossible at the time ... there is evidence to suggest that at the time ... JSTOR did not have a clear vision of what its mission and activities would later become ... if [they] had a clear vision of JSTOR's future in 1995, which for these purposes they did not, it is unclear that sharing it ... would have been desirable.”

But these faults are forgivable, when the story is such a powerful and inspiring one. As for lessons to be learned from JSTOR's experience, there are plenty to be seen. After all, the model of an organisation providing digitisation services for publishers on a non-exclusive basis, and even offering the captured files back to the publisher, is very similar to a more recent initiative, albeit one that has been received with very mixed responses: Google Book Search. How one initiative can be seen as an unqualified success, and the other arouse the fury of whole segments of the publishing community, is an indication of JSTOR's achievement.

Books of interest

Here are some book titles that UKeiG members might be interested in reading about. The list isn't exhaustive; members are welcome to suggest other books for review. If you are interested in reviewing any of these titles, or if you are publisher and you have titles that you think would be of interest to the UKeiG readership, please contact Michael Upshall ( michael@consultmu.co.uk ).

New releases

Julian Warner, Human Information Retrieval November 2009, 200 pp. MIT Press.

An overview of information retrieval rooted in the humanities and social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory.

Information retrieval in the age of Internet search engines has become part of ordinary discourse and everyday practice: “Google” is a verb in common usage. Thus far, more attention has been given to practical understanding of information retrieval than to a full theoretical account. In Human Information Retrieval, Julian Warner offers a comprehensive overview of information retrieval, synthesizing theories from different disciplines (information and computer science, librarianship and indexing, and information society discourse) and incorporating such disparate systems as WorldCat and Google into a single, robust theoretical framework. There is a need for such a theoretical treatment, he argues, one that reveals the structure and underlying patterns of this complex field while remaining congruent with everyday practice. Neither narrowly practical nor largely speculative, Human Information Retrieval meets the contemporary need for a broader treatment of information and information systems.

Julian Warner is on the faculty of the Queen's School of Management at Queen's University, Belfast. He is the author of Humanizing Information Technology, Information, Knowledge, Text, and From Writing to Computers.

Mcafee, Andrew. Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. Harvard Business School Press, 2009.

Nicole Engard Practical Open Source Software for Libraries (mentioned in Tracy Kent's column this month).

Going Beyond Google: The invisible Web in learning and teaching
Jane Devine and Francine Egger-Sider (Facet, £44.95)


Reference and Information Services in the 21st Century: An Introduction

2nd edition, August 2009; 384pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-688-6; £44.95

Community Archives: The shaping of memory
August 2009; 224pp; hardback; 978-1-85604-639-8; £49.95

Libraries and Information Services in the UK and ROI 2009-2010

36th edition, August 2009; 480pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-679-4; £49.95

The Innovative School Librarian: thinking outside the box
Sharon Markless (editor),
June 2009; 224pp; hardback; 978-1-85604-653-4; £44.95

Web Accessibility: practical advice for the library and information professional

Jenny Craven, editor suggested 24/6)

Searching 2.0

Michael Sauers (Facet, April 2009)

Information Science in Transition
Alan Gilchrist, editor
April 2009; 400pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-693-0; £49.95

Managing Electronic Records, 4th edition
William Saffady
paperback; 978-1-85604-699-2; £52.95 (Facet Publishing, May 2009)

Books on Wikipedia

There seems to be a spate of books about Wikipedia. Here are a few – there will almost certainly be others.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia (Hyperion, 2009)

Andrew Dalby, The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality (Siduri Books, 2009).

O'Sullivan, Dan. Wikipedia : a new community of practice? (Ashgate, 2009)

Older titles

Know It All, Find It Fast: An A-Z Source Guide For The Enquiry Desk,
Bob Duckett, Peter Walker and Christinea Donnelly; 496pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-652-7; £34.95 (Facet Publishing, 3rd Edition, October 2008)

Phil Bradley: How to Use Web 2.0 in Your Library

(Facet, May 2007); 224pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-607-7; £39.95

This new book from acclaimed author Phil Bradley takes a clear and practical approach as it explains exactly how to use the different types of Web 2.0 technologies, and shows how libraries can get the most out of them (using case studies). Illustrations help guide readers through each step of creating a range of resources, and a companion website, including podcasts from the author, ensures readers are kept up to date with developments in this highly dynamic and fast-moving area.

Digital Consumers: re-shaping the information professions

David Nicholas and Ian Rowlands, editors

256pp; hardback; 978-1-85604-651-0; £39.95 (Facet, August 2008)

The information professions – librarianship, archives, publishing and, to some extent, journalism – have been rocked by the digital transition that has led to disintermediation, easy access and massive information choice. There is a need for a new belief system that will help information professionals survive and engage in a ubiquitous information environment, where they are no longer the dominant players, nor, indeed, the suppliers of first choice.

Zhang, Allison and Gourley, Don: Creating Digital Collections: A Practical Guide (Chandos,

September 2008)

Agnew, Grace: Digital Rights Management: A Librarian's Guide to Technology and Practise (Chandos, September 08)

King, Brandy and Reinold, Kathy: Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word: A librarian's guide to ontologies and semantics (Chandos, Sept 2008)

Batley, Susan: Information Architecture for Information Professionals (Chandos, February 2007)

Baker, David, and Wendy Evans. Digital Library Economics (Chandos Publishing, 2009)

Browne and Jermey, The Indexing Companion (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Byron, Berry, Haug & Eaton: Using Drupal (O'Reilly, 2008)

Devine, Jane, and Francine Egger-Sider. Going Beyond Google: the Invisible Web in Learning and Teaching . Facet Publishing, 2009.

Engard, Nicole (editor): Library Mashups (Facet, September 2009)

Gilchrist, Alan, editor: Information Science in Transition (Facet Publishing, April 2009)

JISC e-book: The e-Revolution and Post-Compulsory Education: Using e-Business Models to deliver Quality Education (new edition, Sept 2009)

Lessig, Lawrence: Remix – Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (Bloomsbury 2008)

Newson, Alex: Blogging and other social media (Gower, 2008)

Zeng, Marcia Lei, and Jian Qin. Metadata . Facet Publishing, 2008.