One more to bookmark

The Legal Genealogist usually doesn’t advise people that there’s something they have to add to their reading list.

I figure genealogists all have a list as long as our arms, online and off, and we don’t often need help in that category.

But there’s a new offering that’s irresistable — and way too good to keep to myself.

It’s called JSTOR Daily, and I’ve already added it to my reading list.

The email announcement I received says it’s “a new online magazine that offers a fresh take on our world. JSTOR Daily draws connections between the stories you read about in your favorite news publications and the material housed on JSTOR.”¹

And, it added, “In addition to daily blog posts, we’ll publish one captivating long read each week, as well as interviews with scholars about their work, and much more.”²

Now JSTOR, in case you’re not familiar with it, is:

a not-for-profit organization, founded to help academic libraries and publishers.

JSTOR is a shared digital library created in 1995 to help university and college libraries free up space on their shelves, save costs, and provide greater levels of access to more content than ever before. More generally, by digitizing content to high standards and supporting its long-term preservation, we also aim to help libraries and academic publishers transition their activities from print to digital operations. Our aim is to expand access to scholarly content around the world and to preserve it for future generations. We provide access to some or all of the content free of charge when we believe we can do so while still meeting our long-term obligations.

JSTOR currently includes more than 2,000 academic journals, dating back to the first volume ever published, along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for education. We have digitized more than 50 million pages and continue to digitize approximately 3 million pages annually. Our activities, our fee structure, and the way we manage the service and its resources reflect our historical commitment to serve colleges and universities as a trusted digital archive, and our responsibility to publishers as stewards of their content. This underlying philosophy at JSTOR remains the core of our service even as we continue to seek ways to expand access to people beyond academic institutions.³

If you have access to JSTOR through your community or academic library, JSTOR has extremely rich and deep content in categories ranging from world culture to law. If you don’t, then as an individual, we can access some free offerings from JSTOR, with an ability to save a very small number at a time of articles to a personal library. And there’s a paid option called JPASS, for $19.50 a month or $199 a year, with unlimited access to about 85% of the journals JSTOR has.⁴

Okay… so why am I recommending this JSTOR Daily thing? Because the content is just plain cool. And every article is documented with links to JSTOR content that may give us some ideas of where to go to find out more.

Right now, articles on the site include:

• a column called “(Un)Catalogued”, written by historian Megan Kate Nelson, where she will focus on “all … kinds of questions of archival collecting, digitization, and research.” On the site right now is the introductory piece, “(Un)Catalogued: Adventures in Historical Research,”⁵ and her latest column, “(Un)Catalogued: Finding Your Place by Looking at Maps.”⁶

• an article about the Canadian government’s announcement that it found one of the ships of the Franklin expedition to the arctic, lost in 1845.⁷

• an historical look at ostentatious homebuilding — beginning in mid-18th century Massachusetts.⁸

• a piece on gender roles and housework, with some surprising research into the issue.⁹

• A piece on the influx of animals such as coyotes into suburban and urban areas.¹⁰

This content is for our personal use only — the site’s terms of use provide that “readers may display and print for your personal, non-commercial use portions of content from JSTOR Daily. You may not otherwise alter or use any of the content without ITHAKA’s prior written consent nor may you undertake any activity such as computer programs that automatically download or export JSTOR Daily content and that may interfere with, disrupt or otherwise burden the JSTOR Daily server(s) or any third-party servers being used or accessed on connection with JSTOR Daily. You may use a hypertext link or any other ITHAKA provided method of linking to our content so long as the link does not state or imply any sponsorship or endorsement of your site by us or any other affiliation with JSTOR Daily.”¹¹

This is nice stuff — with some good ideas about where to go for more information. And you can get it delivered by email through the JSTOR Newsletter.

Highly recommended.

SOURCES