Dear colleagues,

With the pace of technological change and the range of options before us all, there are no primrose paths these days. It seems that every decision is full of complexities and contradictory interests. Although that presents challenges, ITHAKA is an organization that believes in learning together with our community to navigate them. We believe that by sharing insights, experiences, and expertise, we can find better ways to help libraries, publishers, and educators adapt and thrive in this evolving landscape.

Over the course of the last year, there have been a number of examples where your guidance has made a real difference. Together, we have: developed a Full Access Model to make more content available to JSTOR participating institutions; interviewed librarians to better understand the challenges they face managing their analog and digital collections; engaged Ithaka S+R research cohorts; worked with archives on our Portico preservation pilots; and talked with JSTOR publishers about their views on AI. We appreciate your engagement, feedback, and candor as we continue our work on these and other initiatives to make knowledge and education more accessible and useful.

In the 2024 ITHAKA Community Letter I sent in January, I highlighted two strategic mission-driven priorities where we are deeply engaged in learning with librarians, publishers, educators, and students. They are to:

  • Safely, effectively, and affordably leverage advanced technologies, including AI, to empower our community; and
  • Build shared infrastructure for library stewardship of digital collections.

During 2024 we are making important progress in both areas.

With regard to leveraging advanced technologies, we have continued to build out JSTOR’s interactive research tool, which was first launched in limited beta in August 2023. Designed to empower users to engage more deeply with texts on JSTOR, the tool employs generative AI and other innovative technologies to support conversational inquiry, surface key points, and enable the discovery of new topics and texts. So far, over 27,000 individual users have participated in the beta program. Their feedback has been crucial to the tool’s ongoing development to ensure it aligns with our community’s values and supports scholarly excellence. This fall, we’ve expanded the beta to include all users from a dozen participating colleges and universities to test new features and usage at the institutional level. Through this community-driven approach, we are exploring ways we can sustain these capabilities and continue to support the amazing engagement with published scholarship they have made possible for JSTOR users.

We have been equally focused on meeting library needs as they continue to steward their collections. Through extensive interviews, libraries told us time and time again that they have significant special collections that are uncatalogued and essentially invisible. In addition to investing in services that enable libraries to manage, preserve, and share their collections on the JSTOR platform, we have launched a new initiative called Project Odyssey to explore ways to help libraries process primary source documents and collections. We have built an initial prototype system that, using generative AI, can auto-generate metadata for primary source documents and images in minutes. We are testing the prototype now with a variety of partner institutions.

These are exciting efforts, and as we pursue them we’ll share what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and continue to invite testing and feedback. I encourage you to read more about our work in both these areas in our blog post Enhancing access and engagement with innovative technologies and to reach out directly to me or your colleagues at ITHAKA to learn more.

As we head into fall, I also want to thank the many members of the art and visual resources community who have been invaluable partners to us. You have supported our efforts to integrate Artstor’s high-quality collections and key functionality onto JSTOR over the past several years, and we’re grateful for your engagement. As of August 1, 2024, the JSTOR platform is the official home of Artstor’s unmatched collection of rights-cleared images and multimedia for use in teaching and research. Artstor’s robust research and instructional tools are now fully integrated into JSTOR Workspace as well. I cannot stress enough how important it has been to learn from Artstor users and those who see the cross-disciplinary value of the Artstor collection to JSTOR users. To learn more about the journey from Artstor to JSTOR and the exciting future this transition holds for the community, I encourage you to read reflections from Lia Friedman and Laura Schwartz, two stewards of a foundational Artstor collection from UC San Diego Library. Their insights offer a compelling perspective on the evolution of Artstor as a resource, and their excitement about its continued growth and broader reach on the JSTOR platform is inspiring to read.

Our door is open, as always. We look forward to continuing to learn from and with you as we pursue our mission to expand access to knowledge and education through these and many other initiatives.

Sincerely,
Kevin Guthrie