Many college and university libraries have digitized their valuable collections of unique primary source materials to make them available to researchers online, a practice that accelerated after many of their communities lost access when campuses closed. However, these special collections can be hard to find and often do not reach a global audience. In addition, these collections often focus on topics of great importance to understanding the history and context of today's most-studied topics, such as race, gender, public health, and more.

To help solve this problem, the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA has opened up JSTOR—its widely used digital research platform containing academic journals, books, and primary source documents—for universities to host their unique collections. The JSTOR Open Community Collections initiative aims to make institutions’ special collections more broadly discoverable so they can be used in teaching and scholarship worldwide.

Benefits of Participating

In talking with academic librarians, ITHAKA heard a common set of problems, said Jason Przybylski, the organization’s associate director for Open Collections and Infrastructure.

“Libraries are investing in digitizing their special collections, cataloging them, and making them available through their own website and through other sources,” Przybylski said. “But these collections aren’t being discovered as much as institutions would like. They’re generally not in the places where researchers start their work. We thought: This is an area where we might be able to help.”

Since JSTOR is regularly accessed by millions of scholars, students, and faculty around the world each year, “it’s already integrated into many researchers’ workflows,” Przybylski observed. “Plus, the collections are increasingly being discovered by users without an institutional affiliation—62% of the 1.4 million item requests the collections have received so far came from the open web, and 40% of users are discovering them via Google.”

By adding their special collections to JSTOR, universities can make these items openly available and easily discoverable within the research workflow alongside related scholarly content, including text-based journals, ebooks, images, research reports, and other primary source materials.

Special collections are promoted in JSTOR with their own unique landing page, as well as an institutional landing page linking to a university’s special collections. The materials also benefit from features of the JSTOR platform and interface, including indexing in Google, full-text search, citation management tools, an IIIF-compliant image viewer, and innovative research tools such as Text Analyzer and Workspace. In addition, JSTOR supplies participating institutions with usage statistics.

One University’s Experience

University of the Pacific holds many special collections in the Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives (HASCA) that are a source of pride for the institution. Among these are a collection of journals and notebooks from the naturalist John Muir, as well as historic photographs from Stockton, California, where the university is based.

Altogether, HASCA has digitized more than 40,000 items in its special collections, said Special Collections Librarian Nicole Grady Mountjoy.

The university makes these materials available to researchers and the public through an open institutional repository called Scholarly Commons. The materials are also indexed in search engines and have received about 138,000 downloads, primarily through Google, over the last 12 months.

“But the more places the library can make these materials available, the better,” said Michele Gibney, head of Publishing and Scholarship Support for University of the Pacific Libraries.

“We wanted to see what additional discoverability we could have through JSTOR,” said Gibney, explaining why the university joined the Open Community Collections initiative. She added: “JSTOR is a very well-known name within higher education.”

So far, HASCA has made five of its special collections (about 11,000 items) available through JSTOR. In the last 12 months, these materials have received 13,000 views on the JSTOR platform alone. “What makes this additional usage even more encouraging,” Mountjoy said, “is that it comes from students, faculty, and others who are interested in using the materials specifically for scholarly purposes.”

Importing the materials into JSTOR “was incredibly easy on our part,” Gibney said. “We just sent them an OAI-PMH XML harvest URL, and they did the rest.”

Przybylski’s team harvests the content and all related metadata from a university’s website, he explained. The process of making the collections available takes anywhere from two to four weeks.

A Mission-Driven Service

As of press time, more than 200 institutions are participating in the Open Community Collections initiative, Przybylski said, sharing over 1,100 collections that have been accessed by people conducting research at more than 10,300 institutions in over 230 countries and territories.

Universities don’t have to be JSTOR participants to contribute. When they sign up for the initiative, they can choose to make their special collections openly available to anyone or limit access only to their own students and faculty. “About 90 percent of participants have opted for the content to be openly available,” Przybylski said.

This preference for open is directly in line with ITHAKA’s mission of improving access and affordability to education for people around the world and is particularly important in a post-pandemic world where libraries seek to transition to digital-first collections and where instruction is increasingly hybrid.

Participation is free through the end of 2022. To help sustain access to these collections, ITHAKA will charge a nominal fee to participating universities beginning next year and aims to grow the program to include additional services like hosting, preservation, and metadata enhancement.

“As a not-for-profit organization, our goal is to cover the cost of offering the service,” Przybylski said. “We want to make sure it’s scalable and sustainable beyond 2022. Given our mission and because we want to make participation as easy as possible, we plan to make it as affordable as we can.”

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