One of the most difficult features to integrate into a large digital library is the serendipity of browsing. A collection the size of JSTOR’s, which holds full runs of more than 2,000 journals—some dating back to the 18th century—as well as tens of thousands of books and other material, is a wonderful resource for academic researchers seeking specific information. For the more casual user, who may be interested in broader categories of material or just looking for interesting reading, the depth of the collection poses more of a challenge. JSTOR was originally founded in 1995 to serve the scholarly community. However, much of its content, which covers the social sciences, humanities, and non-medical sciences, has popular appeal. Heidi McGregor, vice president for marketing and communications of ITHAKA, JSTOR’s parent company, had been considering this. She told LJ that “finding a way to promote deeper understanding and engagement around issues and ideas by exposing the deep, comprehensive academic archives in meaningful ways was actually something that JSTOR’s managing director, Laura Brown, had in her mind as a goal when she joined the organization several years ago.” The two discussed possible solutions, and in late 2013 decided to launch a free online magazine to highlight JSTOR’s diverse content for a popular audience. JSTOR Daily (JD) launched on October 1, with editor Catherine Halley at the helm, and early responses have been uniformly enthusiastic. The site, which has been up in beta version since June, features an ongoing series of weekly feature articles and daily blog posts that cover areas ranging from the arts to politics to technology—recent subjects include women in video games, Gertrude Stein, and the semantics of McDonald’s. Each piece links to content from JSTOR’s library that has been opened up for free access to JD users. “The site creates an easy way for folks to take a first step into the library and JSTOR,” Halley told LJ, “both readers who are familiar with JSTOR and new readers.”

A NETWORK OF WRITERS

Halley, who joined JSTOR in April 2014, was instrumental in shaping JD. She was previously the digital director at the Poetry Foundation. There, she told LJ, she was working to find a general audience for poetry, which “in many ways is similar to scholarship. It can be seen as elite, let’s say.” Her approach was similar to her recent work at JD: “I was hiring non-poets to write about poetry because they can create a lingua franca for the rest of the world, interest them in projects they didn’t know they were interested in. It’s storytelling…. [JD] is about telling a great story and connecting news stories.” Halley recruited JD writers from her own network, contacting people who had written for her in the past, as well as tweeting a call for writers and exploring other publications and news organizations to find work she liked. Writers pitch their own stories to Halley, and are then given access to JSTOR material to locate relevant references that they can then link to in their articles. Margaret Smith, the physical sciences librarian at New York University, first heard about JD’s call for bloggers through a friend, and has signed on for a year. She has written on oysters, underwater noise, and Osamu Shimomura, the organic chemist who discovered green fluorescent protein in 1962. Livia Gershon, a freelance writer from Nashua, NH, has written for JD on topics ranging from a history of American mansions to Tesla Motors. Gershon told LJ that she has enjoyed getting the chance to focus on her interests—economics and education—and to dig into the archive. “It’s nice to be part of something bringing really smart people who have really smart things to say to an audience they might not have had originally.”

ACCESS FOR A BROADER PUBLIC

This is the most recent extension of JSTOR’s initiative to increase access to its database, which consists of more than 50 million pages of content, with an additional 3 million pages digitized every year. While it is traditionally only available institutionally, over the past several years JSTOR has initiated options for unaffiliated users. Register & Read enables individuals to register for a free MyJSTOR account, and then select up to three articles for two weeks at a time for read-only access. JPASS, launched in September 2013, is a plan allowing users access to a portion of JSTOR’s journal content for a monthly or yearly fee. JD is still considered a beta program, and JSTOR will be watching the data closely. (Approximately 50 percent of the site’s users are in the United States, with the rest scattered around the world, including an unexpected cluster of readers in Iceland.) Site metrics will help drive Halley’s decisions about what to cover, with her caveat that “this is not going to be Buzzfeed. We’re not chasing after traffic.” She envisions JD’s perfect reader as a “lapsed academic,” much like herself. Topics move easily among current events, popular science, trivia, politics, and pop culture. This cabinet-of-curiosities model makes JSTOR’s content easier—and more fun—to browse, enabling readers to make their own associations between archived content and issues that concern or intrigue them. “What we’re trying to do,” Halley explains, “is interest people in scholarship, which allows us to be both high culture and low culture, quirky.” McGregor adds, “JSTOR Daily is for anyone interested in learning—in diving deeper. We are eager to use this as a way to reach a broader public, yes; but it’s equally for faculty, students, librarians, publishers, and independent researchers and professionals who already know and use JSTOR.”