We would like to invite you to a webinar for Alliance member institutions to learn about JSTOR’s Open Community Collections initiative on Monday, May 17 (1:30-2:30pm MT). The Webinar is open to anyone interested and you may register in the link at the bottom of this announcement.
Since early 2020, JSTOR has been allowing participating institutions to make their primary source/special collections available on the JSTOR platform in an effort to learn if JSTOR can be an effective channel for getting those collections more substantially into the workflow of researchers. To date, over 400 collections were published on the JSTOR platform (from nearly 125 institutions), and the usage has exploded for this content.
Institutions can still participate in the initiative for the entirety of 2021 – with no hosting fees – and evaluate the program (with evidence) to determine whether to continue after the end of the evaluation period. Again, there is no commitment after the evaluation period. During the first half of 2021, JSTOR will be defining and validating the services they intend to provide starting in 2022, including preservation services, metadata enhancement services, TDM services, and others. They will also be working on more seamlessly connecting these primary source/special collections with the secondary literature (journal articles, book chapters) already on the JSTOR platform in an effort to provide more context to the content during the research process. The content is being indexed in Google, and beginning in May, JSTOR will be syndicating the Open Community Collections content to discovery services like Primo/Alma, Summon, EDS, and WorldCat.
For the Alliance, we are interested in making you aware of this initiative, and offer you the opportunity to participate, should you be interested. The webinar will review: (1) why JSTOR is exploring this idea; (2) what type of content is being published to the JSTOR platform by participating institutions; (3) what the early evidence is showing about the efficacy of the JSTOR channel; and (4) what interested institutions need to do to participate.
Bruce Heterick, ITHAKA’s SVP for Open Collections & Infrastructure, will be leading the webinar.
Click on the following links to sign up for one of the webinars: