In making the decision to fund Brown's proposal, NEH was extremely complimentary regarding both the proposal and the institution. Sheldon Hackney, Chairman of the Endowment, capsulized the evaluators' reaction in his formal letter congratulating us on the grant:
Your proposal was reviewed by outstanding college and university scholars, administrators, and librarians with experience in long-term planning for the humanities. These evaluators praised Brown's reputation for leadership in preservation programs and policies: the mix of methods and strategies for restoring and reformatting existing collections and for preventing the deterioration of current received materials were seen as representing the best current thinking in the field. Brown's strategic plans for conservation could result in a national model for the effective preservation of major collections, in addition to preserving humanities collections of national significance.
High praise, especially given the intensely competitive environment of the Challenge Grant program! Brown's proposal was written by Eric Shoaf, Head, Preservation Department, with the able assistance of Frederick C. Lynden, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services, and Samuel A. Streit, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections. The University Development Office collaborated on the section of the proposal regarding how the match would be met.
In a second significant advance, in January 1997 the Library became a charter participant in JSTOR ("journal storage"), an initiative which was started with funding from the Mellon Foundation in 1994, and which has since become a non-profit corporation. JSTOR began as an effort to assist libraries in dealing with the space and financial problems created by having to maintain large runs of journal backfiles. The goal, as stated by Mellon Foundation President William Bowen and JSTOR Director Kevin Guthrie in a March 1996 article, was to "convert the back issues of the paper journals into electronic formats that would allow savings in capital costs while simultaneously improving access to the contents of the journals and addressing preservation problems." Since its inception, JSTOR has producted digitized copies of all the pre-1990 issues of ten major journals in history and economics. Journal pages were both bitmapped (e.g., digitized so that they will look on the screen just as they do in print) and "linked to a text file generated with optical character recognition (OCR) software which, along with newly constructed indexes, allow for complete search and retrieval of the published material."
Thanks to the presence of JSTOR on the Brown campus, faculty members and students will be able to do full-text searches on this journal database, as well as searches by abstract, author citation, and author title. They will be able to access the journals from any location that can get to the campus network, and to print out articles in their home or office. As Messrs. Bowen and Guthrie point out, this "library" is never closed, and these journals not only are never out, they are always in pristine condition. JSTOR may have begun as a way for libraries to save money and space, but it is on the way to becoming "a scholarly tool of enormous value."
Over the course of the next three years, JSTOR intends to digitize the complete runs of a minimum of 100 important journal titles in 10 - 15 fields. As the database grows in size, it will become increasingly useful and will offer the Library some relief for its space problems (assuming that searching the database online becomes easy and ubiquitous for students and faculty, the Library could send enormous paper backruns to storage, freeing space for new acquisitions). By joining at this time, Brown secures a very favorable price for the JSTOR license and the chance to be in on the ground floor of what may be a history-making initiative.
We invite Friends to celebrate these exciting developments with us and we'll be keeping you informed of our progress as these projects develop.