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Essay / Journal Storage by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Journal Storage is a digital library created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1995, well known as JSTOR. The JSTOR home page is www.jstor.org. The main language is English, it also includes content in other languages. The owner of JSTOR is now ITHAKA, a non-profit organization founded in 2003 with the mission of incubating promising new projects supporting the use of technology to benefit higher education. It is designed to hold digitized academic journals. It now also includes books and primary sources, as well as current issues of journals. The identification and description of JSTORJSTOR was initiated at seven different library sites and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. It was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries due to the increasing number of existing academic journals, particularly academic libraries. Because most libraries found it expensive to maintain a complete collection of journals. By digitizing journals, JSTOR could allow libraries to outsource the storage of these journals so that they remain available for the long term. JSTOR offers full-text searches of nearly 2,000 journals. More than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries have access to JSTOR; Most access is by subscription, but some older public domain content is freely available to anyone. JSTOR is improving its access based on feedback from its initial websites and has become a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary web browser. To make images and graphics clear and readable, special software has been implemented. In 2012, JSTOR launched a program offering individual academics and researchers who register it a limited and free...... middle of paper ...... st Journals on JSTOR are controlled by a "wall mobile”, which is an agreed time between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is generally three to five years. Publishers may request that the time period be changed or request that coverage be discontinued. Previously, publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be replaced with a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would no longer add new volumes to its database. Contributors may therefore not be able to find current articles. And this is the limitation of JSTOR. I really like JSTOR's interface, especially the fonts, symbols and images. The layout is welcome. It's neat and useful. There are tutorials and finding aids that show users how to use it. So I think it's a good university digital library.