April 4, 2008 – JSTOR  is an archive of high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. With the new interface introduced on April 4, 2008, JSTOR offers new ways of searching and browsing its contents.

MyJSTOR

MyJSTOR is the first step in providing greater personal customization for users throughout the site. With this first release, users can:

• Manage citations over time by saving them to a MyJSTOR account, where they can be stored indefinitely. Users will need to create an account in order to save or send citations, as well as to save them to bibliographic software
• Accept JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use once, rather than being prompted to respond with each article print or download

The following enhancements have been made to JSTOR searching:

Basic search

• Basic searches, which search the full-text of all journals, can be entered directly from the home page
• Basic searches can be limited by discipline

Advanced search

• Searches can be limited by selecting discipline(s) or specific journal titles, or by directly entering a specific title into the form
• Proximity search is now available in the Advanced Search form, using NEAR 5, NEAR 10, NEAR 25 operators in the Boolean pull-down menus

Basic and advanced searches

• Searches from an individual session are saved, and they can be rerun from a dropdown menu at the bottom of each of these search forms
• Users are able to search for both the singular and plural versions of a word by adding an ampersand (&) to the end of the singular form of the word. Plurals now identify both regular (cat/cats) and irregular (knife/knives) plural forms
• Users have the option to apply stemming to their search by appending the "#" character at the end of their search term, e.g., operate#

Search results

• The "search within these results" feature allows users to run a new search that restricts the content being searched to the results of their most recent search
• Thumbnail images of articles make it easier to see articles at a glance and to select pages within articles

PDF articles

• JSTOR now offers articles in a single, improved format of PDF for printing
• The PDF versions of articles provide bookmarks for easier navigation, both throughout the article as well as the entire issue

Originally conceived as a project at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals. JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR's archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available in JSTOR.

For more information on JSTOR, contact your college librarian.