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Published by EH.Net (October 2003)  
 
Roger C. Schonfield, _JSTOR: A History_. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2003. xxxiv + 412 pp. $29.95 (hardback), ISBN: 0-691-11531-1.
 
Reviewed for EH.Net by Royce Kurtz, Head of Reference, J.D. Williams Library, University
of Mississippi.
 
_JSTOR: A History_ is not a modest book. Few nonprofit enterprises warrant a history when
they are less than ten years old. Even fewer infant organizations dare to declare
themselves successful when their mission is to store knowledge in perpetuity. _JSTOR_ is
the story of an excellent idea with even better unintended consequences that succeeded
because its sponsor was a powerful man with monetary resources and well-placed friends.
While the very antithesis of the Cinderella tale, _JSTOR_ is still a fascinating read as
one is given an inside look in how the educational elite can bring money and skill
together to create a successful electronic business in the midst of the .com crash.
 
William G. Bowen, the book's hero, is a man of distinction. When the story of JSTOR begins
in 1993, Bowen was president of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a nonprofit
that had already given millions in grant money to higher education. He was a nationally
recognized economist specializing in nonprofits, an emeritus president of Princeton
University, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Denison College, a selective, small
liberal arts college in Ohio. Denison needed to build a new library, the old one having
reached capacity. Upon surveying the library, Bowen realized that by digitizing the long
runs of old journals much space could be freed up and the need to build a new library
postponed. As college and university libraries all held virtually the same set of core
journals, the aggregate space savings, and hence financial savings, of delaying library
construction by means of digital collections would ripple across higher education. Bowen
took his idea back to the board of trustees at Mellon, and they immediately funded a pilot
project.
 
Roger C. Schonfeld, the author, is a research associate at the Mellon foundation. He has
access to the Foundation's files and interviewed high level participants in order to give
readers the feel of being in the know as events unfolded. While Schonfeld occasionally
points out the naivete of Bowen and his colleagues when approaching technological and
legal hurdles, the Mellon Foundation and its leaders never come in for harsh criticism.
Theirs is a story of sound judgement, wise use of resources, and impeccable timing with a
dash of good luck. In order to succeed, adept administrators were needed as well as large
and timely cash flows. Bowen supplied both. While maintaining close ties with his project,
Bowen also lined up Kevin Guthrie to officially head up the operation and pilot JSTOR (the
name of Bowen's computer file for the project) to the status of an independent nonprofit.
Guthrie had worked on Mellon Foundation projects before and was well known to Bowen. In
the end it was Guthrie's managerial skills and Bowen's strategic appeals to the Mellon
Board for money that kept the young project moving forward.
 
Two huge problems had to be overcome for the project to begin. First were the
technological problems of scanning millions of pages, providing hardware and software
sufficient to store, search, and quickly deliver the product to thousands of locations
worldwide. Second were the legal problems of gaining copyright permission from dozens of
journal publishers in order to digitize their back files. While few journal publishers
make money from their back files, all were cautious about signing away the rights.
Technology issues were resolved as Bowen contacted his good friend, the president of the
University of Michigan, who found a home for the fledgling program in the university's
major and innovative digitization efforts. Michigan engineers and computer scientists
worked on perfecting software for JSTOR, and Michigan staff organized the journals for
scanning by a private company. Many of the journals that JSTOR wished to scan were
published by either university presses or scholarly associations. Bowen's friendships
among university presidents got JSTOR's lawyers a favorable hearing from these publishers.
 
When it came time to market JSTOR to university libraries, Bowen again called on
University presidents, not library directors, in order to sell the product. It is not
surprising that virtually all of JSTOR's first customers were large university research
libraries. The journal titles that JSTOR had digitized would make virtually no impact on
these libraries' storage problems. Indeed JSTOR's success came, not primarily from solving
storage concerns, but by providing easy access to the long back files of a bundle of
essential scholarly journals.
 
Schonfeld provides lengthy descriptions of the ins and outs of setting up a nonprofit
enterprise. Librarians and academic administrators, who are struggling with how to pay for
electronic products, will find the details of how JSTOR arrived at its value pricing model
fascinating. As a nonprofit associated with the Mellon Foundation, JSTOR developed
different marketing and pricing models for unique customers, such as the Appalachian
Colleges Association. Libraries outside the United States and library buying consortia
also proved to be challenging markets. Schonfeld also provides details on production
operations, establishing business models for nonprofits, and the politics of the nonprofit
world of higher education. Schonfeld is a great story teller; his book skillfully
intertwines the specifics of setting up a scholarly nonprofit enterprise with the larger
intellectual issues of scholarly communications and the economics of the nonprofit sector.
_JSTOR: A History_ is a must read for economists interested in nonprofits and for
librarians (or anyone else) interested in where college and university library collections
are headed.
 
 Royce Kurtz received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in anthropology, specializing in
frontier interactions between Euro-Americans and native Americans. He is currently the
bibliographer for history and the social sciences at the University of Mississippi
libraries. He has published in both the fields of history and library science.
 
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Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (October 2003). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
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