JSTOR, a not-for-profit digital archive of scholarly journals, books, and other content, recently launched a new Labs team that partners with publishers, libraries and labs to develop new ways of organizing and navigating research literature in a digital environment. In this talk, Alex Humphreys, Director of JSTOR Labs, discusses the development of a new JSTOR project focused on Sustainability. The project, which incorporates scholarly and policy literature from the environmental humanities and social sciences, is being designed with guidance from scholars and subject librarians across disciplines to help students and scholars better understand and navigate the growing corpus of interdisciplinary research in this field. The talk will include a discussion of the challenges in building a library of scholarly materials on Sustainability, a demonstration of some of the functionality that has been developed for the Sustainability project in collaboration with scholars, including a semantic index and a collection of topic pages, and an overview of the research and development methodology that we use in developing new functionality for JSTOR—a process that has enabled us to develop and test new features in as little as a week’s time. The talk may be of especial interest to conference attendees who teach undergraduate students, and to graduate students and early-stage scholars who are considering alternative-academic careers in publishing or technology.

1. JSTOR
SUSTAINABILITY:
CREATING A
MULTIDISCIPLINARY MAP
FOR RESEARCHERS
31 March, 2016
Alex Humphreys, JSTOR Labs
@abhumphreys
ASEH 2016 Panel: Digital Landscapes -
Mapping History, Mapping the Discipline

2. JSTOR is a not-for-profit
digital library of academic
journals, books, and primary
sources.
Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit
research and consulting service
that helps academic, cultural,
and publishing communities
thrive in the digital
environment.
Portico is a not-for-profit
preservation service for digital
publications, including
electronic journals, books, and
historical collections.
ITHAKA is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic
community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record
and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

3. JSTOR Labs works with partner publishers, libraries and
labs to create tools for researchers, teachers and students
that are immediately useful – and a little bit magical.

4. Sustainability is …
“development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.”
- UN Brundtland Commission
“Our Common Future” report, 1987

5. THE CHALLENGE

6. Sustainability is
inherently
multidisciplinary
A lot of academic
research is focused on
the single discipline it
contributes to
Researchers must
discover and interpret
research outside their
core discipline
THE CORE PROBLEM, IN ONE DIAGRAM

7. Sustainability is
inherently
multidisciplinary
A lot of academic
research is focused on
the single discipline it
contributes to
Researchers must
discover and interpret
research outside their
core discipline
THE CORE PROBLEM, IN ONE DIAGRAM
“When I’m looking into
a new topic, I try my
best to understand the
story of it.”

8. Sustainability is
inherently
multidisciplinary
A lot of academic
research is focused on
the single discipline it
contributes to
Researchers must
discover and interpret
research outside their
core discipline
THE CORE PROBLEM, IN ONE DIAGRAM
How could JSTOR,
with its broad corpus
of scholarship, help?

9. JSTOR LABS’
APPROACH

10. Talk to users
[need a pic of some sort here]
Still taken from http://labs.jstor.org/blog/#!labs_week-building_jstor_snap

11. What innovation looks like.
Desirable
Image source: http://uxtraordinary.com/venn-pie-agram/

12. Iterayte.
Iterrate.
Itterate.
Iterate.
Iterate!
(rapidly)

13. Iterayte.
Iterrate.
Itterate.
Iterate.
Iterate!
(rapidly)
Some ideas we tested but didn’t build:
- Article Summary
- Highlights
- Why it Matters
- Tweets about this article

14. OUR SOLUTION

15. labs.jstor.org/sustainability

16. TOPICS
• JSTOR Thesaurus: a controlled
vocabulary w/ 48,000+ unique terms
• Each term has:
- parents/children
- synonyms, preferred/non-preferred
terms
- rules by which it is applied to an
article
• Subject matter experts reviewed and
extended the branches dealing with
Sustainability
• With their input, we created
~750 topic pages, ranging from
acid rain to zoogeography

17. JSTOR Sustainability Topics
https://public.tableau.com/profile/beth.dufford#!/vizhome/JSTORSustainabilityTopics/Story1

18. INFLUENTIAL
ARTICLES
• Developed in partnership with
Jevin West and the U of
Washington’s DataLab
• Invented and core development
completed in one week-long
“flash build”
• Incorporates Eigenfactor, a
citation-network based impact
measure developed by Carl
Bergstrom and Jevin West
“When I’m looking into
a new topic, this tells
me the key papers
and people. This is
the topic’s story,
visualized.”

19. WHAT’S
NEXT
• Keep iteratiing iterating
- on the site
- on the topics
• Incorporate into primary
JSTOR site
• Create new “Sustainability
collection” for libraries,
consisting of new-to-JSTOR
journals and research reports
• Explore the application of these
ideas beyond Sustainability:
- Security Studies
- Human Rights
- All of JSTOR…

20. THANK YOU
Alex Humphreys
Director, JSTOR Labs
ITHAKA
http://labs.jstor.org
@abhumphreys
alex.humphreys@ithaka.org

21. APPENDIX A
DETAILS ON
JSTOR’S FORTHCOMING
SUSTAINABILITY COLLECTION

22. THE
SUSTAINABILITY
COLLECTION
» A new curated multidisciplinary collection
of 100 new-to-JSTOR journals drawn from
more than 20 disciplines
» Enhanced by research reports from over
40 leading think tanks around the world
» Tested and built in partnership with
librarians and scholars
» Complemented by the strong base of
content already in JSTOR – more than
200,000 articles from roughly 45
publications in the JSTOR Corpus that
address various issues in sustainability
» Enriched by specialized tools geared to the
interdisciplinary research

23. TOPIC
COVERAGE
»Sustainable Business Practices
»Environmental Engineering
»Environmental Studies
»Environmental Science
»Environmental and Natural
Resources Law
»Energy Policy and Economics
»Urban Planning and the Built
Environment
»Development Studies
»Climatology and Atmospheric
Science
»Human Ecology
»Green Energy
»Transportation and
Infrastructure
»Land Conservation
»Environmental History
»Food Security
»Agricultural Economics
»Public Health and Population
Studies
»Water Management
»Waste Management

24. CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS BY
DISCIPLINE
• Economics
Energy Journal, International
Association for Energy Economics
Journal of the Association of
Environmental and Resource
Economists, University of Chicago
Press
American Journal of Agricultural
Economics, Agricultural & Applied
Economics Association
• Architecture / Built Env.
APT Bulletin, Association for
Preservation Technology
International
CTBUH Journal, Council on Tall
Buildings and Urban Habitat
Built Environment (1978-),
Alexandrine Press
• Public Health
Journal of Public Health Policy
Sustainability, Palgrave Macmillan
Journals
Environmental Health Perspectives,
Brogan & Partners
Occupational and Environmental
Medicine, BMJ Publishing Group
• Aquatic / Env. Sciences
Journal, American Water Works
Association
Opflow, American Water Works
Association
Water Environment Research,
Water Environment Federation
Waterlines, Practical Action
Publishing

25. CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS BY
DISCIPLINE
• Law
Natural Resources & Environment,
American Bar Association
Carbon & Climate Law Review,
Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH
Ecology Law Quarterly, University
of California, Berkeley
Journal of Land Use &
Environmental Law, Florida State
University College of Law
• Sociology
Environmental Values, White
Horse Press
Nature and Culture, Berghahn
Books
Environment & Society, Berghahn
Books
• Urban Studies
Urban Studies, Sage Publications,
Ltd.
Ekistics, Athens Center of Ekistics
• Ecology
Ecological Applications, Ecological
Society of America
Ecological Restoration, University
of Wisconsin Press
Human Ecology, Springer Science
+ Business Media
Conservation Biology, Wiley
Subscription Services, Inc.

26. APPENDIX B
OPEN IN CASE OF
NO INTERNET CONNECTION