Hello, Cheryl. You are not alone, and we appreciate your views. We have heard directly from many librarians and end-users about improving our citation management functionality since the new site launch. We altered our approach to saving citations as a way of satisfying users’ desire to save citations over time by setting up accounts, as opposed to during just one session. This has been a frequently requested feature. While many users are now making use of MyJSTOR to save and manage citations, we realize that a range of options is needed. Very soon after the launch, we implemented a one-off, single citation export feature, which does not require a MyJSTOR account. You may have seen this already—it appears as an option by every search result, on every article information page, and on all issue table-of-contents pages in the browse path. In addition to this near-term enhancement, we are designing a more fully-featured MyJSTOR and Citation Management tool with the aim of enabling users to save the information they need efficiently and in ways that best support their needs. Reference librarians and user studies are helping to guide this development.

To launch or not to launch? This is always a challenging question. Many JSTOR users would not have realized this, but the implementation of the new JSTOR platform was important for a host of reasons. With this launch, JSTOR changed its entire metadata structure, underlying technology platform, and format of articles, in addition to updating the interface and providing some long-requested features. Our ability to ingest new content and to introduce new features and functionality quickly has been dramatically improved, and the results of this effort will become more apparent over time. We will be adding new content types (pamphlets, monographs, manuscripts) and new features, some of which will be previewed on the JSTOR Sandbox (sandbox.jstor.org). I mention this not to minimize any difficulties users may be experiencing now, but to provide a better sense of the need and scale of the change.

We expect that JSTOR will be continually changing going forward. It is possible that some of the things we try will not be as successful as others. But, we will continue to rely on feedback such as yours, and appreciate you taking the time to include a posting about JSTOR. I hope that anyone with questions about JSTOR will feel free to contact support@jstor.org anytime with questions or comments.

Thanks again,

Sherry Aschenbrenner
Director of User Services, JSTOR

Dear Sherry,
Thanks for your comment. I sincerely hope that the "more fully-featured MyJSTOR and Citation Management" will soon include the ability to save and export multiple citations without having or going into a MySTOR account. I understand -- and applaud -- your providing this as an enhanced option, but REALLY, REALLY want to be able to export and save a list of citations seamlessly while searching. I'll be watching the ongoing developments to the new JSTOR system with great interest!
Thanks again,
Cheryl

Thanks to Cheryl for this post and also to Sherry for her response. IMHO, the citation feature issue, annoying though it may be, is the least of the new JStor’s problems; I have been fielding a cacophony of complaints for months now. For example, there has been a frequent lack of search term highlighting. Although some improvement has been noted in just the last week, the problem still persists. Much more serious are the retrievals in which the search terms do not exist at all. This is not only incredibly frustrating for the user, but undermines the integrity of the entire database! Here’s a message I received recently, from John Womack, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard:
“There is some improvement, but still it's insanely slow to download anything, and it's very inconsistent. Five minutes, in an improvement, I found the article, the matching page, and the highlighted word. I forgot to check if there were matches on other pages, went back to check, and there was no indication of any matching page, not the one it had showed me before, or any other.
Can they make it go faster?
Can they make it consistent, and as good as it used to be?
How much did it cost for this degradation of services?”

Please tell me Sherry, can we assure our patrons that JStor will be “as good as it used to be” and if so, when are the myriad problems likely to be resolved?

Sorry for the duplicate postings. I thought you might like to see the very latest JStor complaint I just received today:

"It gives me nine matches for an word in an article, says it will give me the pages, but when I ask for them just
says pick a page, any page.
This is not a scholarly service, but a scholarly torment. It's as if they are mocking us."

And yet another complaint just in -

"Just to vent, so that I do not break the computer, I ask for two terms in a 42-page article, and all I get is
"select a page." This is scholarly bear-baiting."

Hello, Deborah. We are truly sorry that you’ve been receiving complaints, and urge you to keep us in the loop as you hear of them. As of now, we are aware of and are working on some lingering problems that emerged as a result of our data conversion, many of them unfortunately clustered around search term highlighting. To clarify further, the new JSTOR platform uses the same search software as our previous system but with additional improvements. What we have been refining is the code that places highlighting on the page images in the browser. As a result of this work, last Wednesday we released an updated “page of first match” option as well as the ability to jump to search term locations by page. We hope that this new code will help to address many of the concerns you have been hearing.
<p>
It’s risky to try to diagnose problems without all the details (and I apologize for lengthiness) but I’ll try to answer the specific comment of “I ask for two terms in a 42-page article, and all I get is ‘select a page.’" There are now two similar options on search results pages: one is “View list of pages with search term(s)" and the other is “Select a page." It sounds as though these options are being confused. The "Select a page" option is a new feature, and presents thumbnail views of all pages in the article as an aid to navigation, but it doesn’t take one to pages with search terms.
<p>
To help with other problems, including the excessive slowness you mention, we may need to contact you separately for further details. If you, or any others, have ongoing issues, please call us at 1-888-388-3574, or send email to support@jstor.org. It may be that we will need to work back and forth with you as we troubleshoot, but we will try our best to uncover problems and devise solutions.

ONe major problem that I've noticed is that there is no longer a simple "print this article" option. If it is supposed to be under the PDF links, it isn't. All I get when I click on the PDF links is a message about "acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use."

I am a genealogy librarian and at my location we don't use JSTOR to get long strings of academic research on topics. Mostly I teach patrons to use JSTOR to pull up and print a copy of an article from the "William and Mary College Quarterly," since my library has the original paper volumes and they are extemely brittle and do not do well on the photocopier.

The only printing option I could find is to use the browser's print option and print the first page, then change the screen and print the next page , etc. Each time you send the window to the printer you would get 2 pages the first the JSTOR information and the second the article page. A printout like that would not be really helpful to get into the DAR.

"last Wednesday we released an updated “page of first match” option as well as the ability to jump to search term locations by page. We hope that this new code will help to address many of the concerns you have been hearing." (Sherry Aschenbrenner, from message above dated 6/23)

It's still not working correctly. I just did a search, got a reference to a 115- page document, and got no highlighted search term.

JSTOR is a lot more confusing now, and it will be harder to persuade our students to use it. Could we have the old interface back, please?

I am also continually being able to download only partial files--the cover page is there, but then the pdf skips right to page 12 on almost every article I have downloaded. Is anyone else experiencing this?

I'm having the same problem as every pdf I download starts on page 12. I don't know if it is because I'm using a Mac or VPN access, but it sure is annoying as it's much more difficult to read in the default JSTOR browsing mechanism.

Todd -- thanks for posting this info. I'm going to bring this specific problem up with JSTOR and see if they have a fix or advice.
Best,
Cheryl

Unfortunately, we have recently become aware that certain older versions of Mac Preview are incompatible with the newest generation of JSTOR PDFs. For some users, this means that only the cover page is displaying. Other users have reported that the downloaded article appears to be missing the first portion of the article—it begins somewhere after the first 10 pages of the article. The article files are in fact intact and complete, but not all pages are visible in Preview. We are working on a fix and plan to continue to support use of Preview with JSTOR, and we apologize for the problems that this is currently causing for Mac users.

For now, the quickest workaround is to download the latest free copy of Adobe Reader, available on the Adobe web site. Once Adobe Reader is downloaded, please check to make sure that your default PDF viewer is set to Adobe Reader rather than the original PDF viewer installed on your Mac. You will also want to make sure that your popup blocker is turned off for the JSTOR site. The new PDF files are set to open in a new window and popup blockers may affect this.

If any of this is unclear, or for more information, please do message support@jstor.org and we will be happy to assist you further.

Cheryl and Sherry--Thanks for the help. The pdfs I was having problems with open fine in Acrobat reader. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow for digital notetaking like Skim (it appears to have the same problem with the JSTOR pdfs like Preview does) does. For now, I will resave them as text files and annotate in Word.

Hello. To follow up on the JSTOR/Mac Preview thread, I thought I would just forward the announcement that was sent to JSTOR contacts today:

We are glad to report that we have located and fixed a problem that caused an incompatibility between JSTOR PDF files and older versions of Mac Preview. This problem caused only part of the article to be viewable in Preview. The fix released today means that JSTOR PDF files should now be viewable in their entirety in Preview 3.0.9 (the current version integrated with Mac OS 10.4) as well as newer versions integrated with Mac OS 10.5.

Users of Preview 3.0.9 should note, however, that the page images of articles are usually highly compressed to save file size, and may be slow to open on this version of Preview. It is believed that this is a limitation of Preview that Apple corrected in the version of Preview shipped with Mac OS 10.5.

Please contact support@jstor.org with any questions or if you experience further problems with JSTOR PDF files and Mac Preview.

Late posting on this thread, but if anyone's still reading... I downloaded a .pdf of this article from JSTOR:

V.P. Gutschick, 1981. Evolved strategies in nitrogen acquisition by plants. American Naturalist, 118: 607-637.

It downloads fine, opens fine, but: in some .pdf readers (in this case, Foxit), all pages display, but only the cover page will print; in Acrobat, all pages display, but everything but the cover page prints with two big nasty black bars across it. So far as I can tell, it simply is not possible to print this .pdf on the computer I am using at the moment, under Windows XP. This is annoying. Very annoying.