The Brooklyn College Library is proud to be one of the 700 participants in JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technologies by enhancing accessibility to inconvenient-to-retrieve journal literature. 

JSTOR's initial goal is to provide electronic access to back issues of core journals in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Complete runs of important journal back files are currently available and searchable across disciplines via the WWW, thus providing new research possibilities while at the same time helping libraries reduce long-term costs associated with storing these materials. There are 117 titles accessible in the JSTOR collection including: Journal of Black Studies, Current Anthropology, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Political Economy, American Historical Review, ELH, Mathematics of Computation and Political Science Quarterly. New titles and fields are being digitized constantly; they are always accessible and in pristine condition. 

You may already be familiar with many of our full-text journal databases such as Project MUSE and Expanded
Academic ASAP. Although terrifically useful for doing research, very few of their issues published prior to the early 1990s are available online. What makes JSTOR unique is its updating provision known as the "moving wall." JSTOR   provides access to non-current issues only--at any given time you will only be able to access issues published prior to the previous 2 to 5 years. In some measure, it provides publishers protection from the threat of lost revenue due to canceled paper subscriptions. But, more importantly, it provides scholars with a wealth of previously unavailable electronic materials that can not be stolen, defaced or discarded. 

Basic Searching: You may perform full-text searches as well as more narrowly defined searches of author, title and abstract fields. These searches can be qualified by date and limited by discipline or specific journal title. You may also request a particular format, i.e., articles, reviews, opinion pieces and other items.

Advanced Searching: JSTOR allows you to perform all of the typical advanced searching techniques including: Boolean operators with parenthetical precedence options; singular and plural forms of a name; and proximity within a sentence, within a specified number of words, or within a page. Note that all "advanced" search terms must be enclosed in quotes, whether they are single words or phrases. 

JSTOR is clearly on a mission. Without the financial backing and technical support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, none of these materials would be available, searchable or printable electronically. For those of you who are concerned about the preservation of scholarly materials, JSTOR's long-term mission should be of interest:

• To build a reliable and comprehensive archive of  scholarly literature
• To radically improve access to these journals
• To help fill gaps in library collections
• To preserve journals from mutilation and deterioration
• To reduce operating costs associated with the storage and care of collections
• To assist publishers in making the transition from print to electronic modes of publication
• With the use of statistics, to study the impact of providing electronic access on the use of older materials

Adapted from http://www.jstor.org/