CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY AND UC GET ONLINE ACCESS TO ACADEMIC JOURNALS
Date: 1998-09-15
Contact: Terry Colvin, UCOP,
Phone: (510) 987-9198
Email: Terry.colvin@ucop.edu

Thanks to the Internet and digitized technology, beginning this week faculty and students throughout the University of California system will gain unprecedented access to the complete back runs of leading scholarly journals —including some that have been published continuously for more than 100 years.

UC’s California Digital Library signed an agreement to participate in JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community take advantage of advances in information technology. UC joins the University of Texas and the State University of New York as state university systems that have signed on with JSTOR.

JSTOR is creating a fully searchable electronic database, accessible with standard browsers via the World Wide Web, which will contain the archives of at least 100 major research journals in a variety of academic disciplines.

By participating in JSTOR, students and faculty at the nine University of California campuses will now be able to retrieve complete copies of all articles printed in the journals—some dating back to the 1880s. JSTOR’s service is the only one of its kind that catalogues and digitizes the entire contents of periodicals that are more than 100 years old. Journals digitized by JSTOR include American Economic Review, American Historical Review, American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Asian Studies.

Addition of the journals in digitized format will significantly enhance UC’s 29-million volume library collection while saving money and valuable shelf space in its more than 100 libraries across the state. UC joins 306 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, as well as 20 in United Kingdom that offer the JSTOR resources.

"We are extremely pleased to be working with the California Digital Library to make JSTOR available to the more than 300,000 faculty, staff, and students of the University of California," says Kevin Guthrie, President of JSTOR.

"Students and faculty will now be able to do direct, online research using many of the most important journals in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. JSTOR participation should also enable the University of California to realize long-term savings in the storage of these journal materials, which are now housed in multiple libraries on separate campuses."

"Because of its size and scale, the University of California system is an ideal JSTOR participant," Guthrie said.

University Librarian Richard Lucier, who was appointed last fall as executive director of the California Digital Library, called the agreement "a unique collaboration that not only provides access to all nine University of California campuses, but also anticipates the opening of the 10th campus, and allows special opportunities to experiment with public library and community college access."

"This is especially auspicious for California scholars given the scope and quality of JSTOR’s journals and the organization’s commitment to archiving content for the long term."

JSTOR, located on the World Wide Web at http://www.jstor.org, was established in 1994 as a pilot project by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help libraries meet the space and budgetary challenges posed by the growing volume of scholarly research. JSTOR’s charter participants include a diverse range of public and private colleges and universities of all sizes, from the nation’s largest research universities to small, liberal arts colleges. JSTOR also offers a unique opportunity for scholars, researchers and students to gain better and easier access to important information, and allows users to research journals that may not be available in paper at their institution’s library. Unlike most full-text, accessible, electronic resources, JSTOR is unique in offering researchers the ability to retrieve a high-resolution, scanned image of each journal page as it was originally designed, printed, and illustrated.

The California Digital Library (CDL) is the 10th UC library, and is operated as a systemwide co-library. UC President Richard C. Atkinson, in launching the start of the library last October, called CDL "a library without walls." CDL is responsible for the design, creation and implementation of systems that support the shared collections of the University of California. Several CDL projects also focus on collaboration with other California colleges, universities and organizations to join in creating and extending to UC and the public increased access to digital collections.

CDL is also working with the California State Library to create the Library of California, which will link public, school and college and university libraries around the state to support the sharing of their digitized collections.

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Editors: For additional information on CDL and JSTOR, please call John Ober, CDL assistant director for education & communication, (510) 987-0174; or contact him by email at John.Ober@ucop.edu. Additional information about the California Digital Library may be found at the CDL website, http://www.cdlib.org . For information on JSTOR, call Hilary Dunst at 212/316-3279, or contact her by email at hdunst@aol.com.