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JSTOR: A History, Roger C. Schonfeld. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 412 p. $29.95 (ISBN: 0-691-11531-1)
Author Roger C. Schonfeld, coordinator for research at Ithaka, a newly formed notfor-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education around the world, has written an excellent review of the gestation, growth, and development of JSTOR, the journals storage project begun in 1993. You will remember 1993 as a time when the Mosaic Web browser software had just been introduced, and dot.corns were a glimmer in entrepreneurs' eyes. Indeed, Mosaic is now a distant memory, and the dot.com bubble has burst. But JSTOR remains, steady, reliable, and essential.
The idea for JSTOR came from a library that was running out of space. Denison University in Granville, Ohio, a small, prestigious liberal arts college, made a request for expansion of its Doane Library. This request was added to the list of capital projects put before the university board of trustees, including William G. Bowen, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and president emeritus of Princeton University. Bowen had been studying academic libraries and the higher education market and was concerned that spiraling costs meant that libraries were collecting a decreasing percentage of the scholarly output. Many of these findings were published in 1992 in a...