1 November 2018
This month JSTOR and Apex CoVantage (Apex) are marking the 20th anniversary of their relationship. The organisations have pioneered the high-quality conversion of academic publications to digital form.
JSTOR was founded in the mid-1990s, initially as a grant-funded project from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to the University of Michigan, to test a hypothesis that libraries could save money and improve access to research by creating a centralised database and preservation service that housed digitised versions of the most common journals sitting on their shelves. Library patrons across the world could access the database, and those that held print copies could move them to lower-cost offsite storage. After a proof of concept with a small set of journals in economics and history, JSTOR sought out expertise in large-scale scanning, metadata creation, and OCR (optical character recognition) to help accelerate its work. In 1998, it entered into a contract with Apex to digitise the complete back runs of four journals to JSTOR’s exacting specifications, among them PNAS and Science, and shortly thereafter, the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society.
Adopting new technologies and innovating new workflows
“When we first started, large-scale conversion was far from what it is today,” said Margaret Gupta, Apex Chief Operating Officer. “Spurred on by a relentless pursuit of excellence, we partnered with JSTOR to regularly re-imagine how this work could be done, regularly pushing the envelope of efficiency, adopting new technologies and innovating new workflows. Our relationship created the dynamic for the many innovations we rely on today. It’s been incredible to witness the strides we’ve made together over the years and how it has influenced other organisations to adopt new methods and technology as well, for the betterment of the online knowledge industry as a whole.”
JSTOR and Apex have worked collaboratively over the past 20 years to develop new approaches, like creating software to improve the rendering of colour images embedded in the pages of text documents and software to capture academic citations to support linking among documents. As a result, JSTOR and Apex have converted more than 50 million pages of content across the humanities, social and life sciences and in fifteen languages.
Improving access to knowledge
“Our mission is to improve access to knowledge,” said Laura Brown, JSTOR Managing Director, “Mobilizing to do this to build a shared, digital library for learning requires tremendous investment and collaboration with technology companies like Apex and with the broader scholarly community of publishers, editors, librarians, and funders who all play pivotal roles. It’s because of this work that people access content on jstor.org more than 500,000 times every day. Each and every one of these interactions represents an opportunity for a person to learn and be exposed to something new.”
For both JSTOR and Apex, the most rewarding projects tackled are those that require the development of new solutions. Recently JSTOR engaged Apex to provide insights and conversion services for a Yad Hanadiv-funded project with the University of Haifa and individual scholars to add journals written in Hebrew to the JSTOR library. The project required developing the capability for users to search content written right to left on jstor.org and finding a way to create a search index for material with special diacritical marks known as nikkud. The organisations are building on this expertise and, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, are now engaged in a project to investigate the practicality of large-scale digitisation of Arabic scholarly journals.