Libraries for years have been trying to cope with pressures brought about by escalating costs for serial subscriptions, flat or reduced budgets, and rising expectations from users who demand better service and access to more information. As a part of the significant increase in the amount of electronic data created in the 1990’s, JSTOR (Journal Storage) was founded in order to help libraries deal with some of these pressures.

JSTOR came into existence in 1994 to help libraries having space problems. As a vendor that has converted large back-runs of scholarly journals in electronic format, JSTOR gave libraries the opportunity to discard or store journals in off-site storage. Today, JSTOR archives provide more than 160 journals to over 750 American institutions. Digital information also makes it possible to extend a whole range of materials by making articles available to faculty and students from their offices, homes and dorm rooms 24 hours a day.

At Brandeis, JSTOR has been a valuable tool for researchers by allowing them to use keyword searching through scores of titles covering hundreds of years. JSTOR does not, however, provide access to current issues of a journal. Publishers have feared that making current issues available will undermine their revenues for personal and library subscriptions in print. Consequently, for most titles in JSTOR there is a moving wall of 3-5 years before a current issue is converted to digital form.

From its inception, JSTOR has been archiving titles that have broad subject appeal. The initial title offerings were in history and economics. Since then JSTOR has increased holdings in such diverse areas as African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Ecology, Education, Finance, Language & Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology and Statistics. Currently JSTOR is working with grant funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create an Art History Collection.

Although JSTOR came into being to help libraries with storage problems, up to now there has been very little movement in that direction. Librarians are reluctant to give up their print copies. In a 2000 survey conducted by JSTOR, 61 libraries have either discarded their print copies of JSTOR titles or plan to discard them. In contrast, 61 other libraries have chosen not to discard their print copies, but rather to remove them to remote storage or plan to remove them in the near future.

As space considerations become more and more a concern for us, the library will be giving serious consideration to both options - discard or remote storage - particularly for low use titles. Either way, researchers will not lose access to a print copy. JSTOR is now working with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), headquartered in Chicago, where a full run of each digitized title will be archived in print. Thus, researchers who have need to see the original copy will have access to it, since Brandeis is a member of the CRL and is able to borrow materials from its collections.

To keep abreast of JSTOR’s content plans, and to see journals available to date, go to http://www.jstor.org/about/ upcoming.journals.html. The list is updated regularly as new journals are added.  

Though we are not a member of ARL, the trends in journal costs represented in the graph apply to the Brandeis Libraries. Clearly, these trends are unsustainable, and alternative publishing models are required.

From ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC Issue 204 (June 1999) URL: http://www.arl.org/newsltr/204/big1.html. Used with permission from ARL.  

It is my pleasure to announce the appointment of Dr. Roger S. Kohn as our new Judaica Librarian. Dr. Kohn came to us with impeccable credentials. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and a master's degree in library science from Drexel University. For many years Dr. Kohn worked as an archivist for leading Jewish archives in France and the United States. Between 1991 and 1998 he served as the first Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections at Stanford University Libraries.

Information technologies have given us unprecedented opportunities to shatter geographic boundaries and time constraints. Libraries are no longer just localized repositories of books, journals and archival collections, available for use only when the libraries are open. Information technologies have given us the means to share resources among many libraries around the world. One of Dr. Kohn's responsibilities will be to forge new relationships with other Judaica libraries and archives for the benefit of Brandeis faculty and students.

--Bessie Hahn, University Librarian  

LOUIS, the online catalog of Brandeis University Libraries, now offers the ability to search library records using Hebrew script. This feature is one example of the many benefits that the Brandeis University library community will receive as LOUIS becomes more sophisticated as an integrated library system (ILS). "To give our patrons the capacity to search in Hebrew has always been a high priority for us," said Susan C. Pyzynski, Librarian for ILS Development. "And we are surely getting there!"

On every stand-alone computer in the main library, patrons can now search Hebrew bibliographic records using Hebrew characters and not have to resort to using transliteration in Latin characters. Stand-alone computers appear on at least each floor of the Goldfarb library, including one near the Main Reference desk and one in the Judaica Reference room. These computers are clearly marked and give instructions on how to enter the Hebrew catalog.

Entries that have Hebrew fields can be searched by pressing <Alt> and <shift> together. A small square on the right corner of the screen will then change from "en" (for English), to "he" (for Hebrew) and the keyboard will be switched to Hebrew characters. The patron can then start searching in Hebrew letters. However, there are still some "bugs," especially in the field for the date and the place of publication, but they will be fixed in a future version, which developers expect to have ready by next Summer. This new version will completely integrate the Hebrew entries in the catalog with the rest of it, making searching in LOUIS truly "seamless."

Library users who want to take advantage of Hebrew searching on their own computers must must be running Internet Explorer version 5.0 (or greater) with Hebrew language support. To download both Hebrew language support and auto-language selection for windows, go to the URL: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Click on Product updated then on Hebrew Language support. More information is to be found on the pull-down menu "Help With Hebrew" when you access the Hebrew catalog in LOUIS.  

Access Services has developed some new loan policies to make it easier for library patrons to keep track of due dates and renew their books.

Loan periods have changed this fall at both the Main and the Science Libraries. Anyone checking out books at the Science Library will now enjoy monthly due dates. Books checked out at any time over the course of a month (e.g. in September), will be due the following month (e.g. in October). Undergraduates and university staff receive this same loan period in the Main Library.

Graduate students who borrow materials from the Main Library now enjoy the same loan periods as faculty. All books are due several weeks after the end of the semester in which they were borrowed. There will be three due dates for the year: fall semester books are due Feb. 1, spring semester books are due June 1, and summer books are due Oct. 1. These semester loans apply to materials borrowed from the Main Library only.

To renew books, you may come in person to either the Main or Science library, send an email request to circulation@brandeis.edu, or renew your books online. To renew online, please review the instructions found at http://www.library.brandeis.edu/access/renewals.html. As before, loans periods for books that have been recalled by another borrower are shortened and must be respected for this policy to work.

We hope these new policies will make it easier for you to keep track of your library loans and keep your account up to date! If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

Lisa Hatch, Circulation Manager, Main Library (hatch@brandeis.edu)
Abagail Jones, Circulation Coordinator, Science Library (acjones@brandeis.edu)
Jonathan Nabe, Manager of Science Library (nabe@brandeis.edu)
Sue Swanson, Librarian for Access Services, Main Library (swanson@brandeis.edu)  

Over the summer, some major changes have been made in the layout of the Creative Arts Department.

The most apparent change is the establishment of the Annabelle and Bernard Bahr Creative Arts Periodical Area, which now offers comfortable chairs for journal reading and attractive study carrels for study. We’ve also added a large new bookshelf and more chairs for weary browsers.

New counter shelving was also added to the reference section and the collections shifted into them. This change particularly affects the layout of the music reference collection, which is now much more conveniently located.

On the 4th level, all seating was removed and the space filled in by expansion of the stacks, loosening up several overloaded sections in both the music and art collections that were jammed with books.  

• Alianor True, ed. Wildfire: A Reader. Island Press, 2001.

This anthology chronicles changing attitudes towards forest fires throughout our nation’s history, starting with a Cherokee tale, "The First Fire." Alianor True has brought together selections of works of American authors such as Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mark Twain, Aldo Leopold, and John McPhee. Even as the book was in publication, True recognized another shift in thinking about wildfire, as the media brought us reports about the 2000 fire season, considered the worst in recorded American history.

• Bruce W. Holsinger. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford University Press, 2001.

The subject of this interdisciplinary study, as the author notes, is medieval musical bodies shrouded in metaphor, allegory, poetics, image, and notation - medieval musical cultures and the practices of the flesh. Holsinger considers largely unfamiliar and often bizarre dimensions of medieval musical life that reveal themselves when the human body is taken seriously as a site of musical production. "The sonorous body performed an essential role within poetic practice, theological and devotional discourse, liturgical performance, pedagogical transmission, and visual culture throughout the medieval era."

• Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 2001.

A collection of 16 essays originally presented by well-known Hogarth scholars at a symposium held in conjunction with the 1997 exhibition Hogarth and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture at Northwestern University. These essays depart from the normal focus of publications on Hogarth by "foregrounding the insights of cultural history and late 20th-century theories of gender and race." A few particularly intriguing titles include, "The Flesh of Theory: The Erotics of Hogarth’s Lines," "Unfolding Gender: Women and the ‘Secret’ Sign Language of Fans in Hogarth’s Work," "‘Nature Revers’d’: Satire and Homosexual Difference in Hogarth’s London," "Hogarth’s Working Women: Commerce and Consumption," and "‘A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe’: Hogarth’s Africans."

• Carla G. Suratt. The Internet and Social Change. McFarland & Co., 2001.

The Internet of today is at the end of a long chain of communications technologies that have changed society: the telegraph, the daily newspaper, the telephone, motion pictures, radio, television. Suratt examines the rise of the Internet as the logical extension of the Industrial Revolution and offers a new conceptual framework through which to understand our "Virtual World."

• Jonathan Weinberg. Ambition & Love in Modern American Art. Yale University Press, 2001

This fascinating book examines the power of names in art, with chapters on James McNeill Whistler, Jackson Pollock, Sally Mann, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney, the collaborations of Walker Evans with James Agee and of Erskine Caldwell with Margaret Bourke-White, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The final chapter, "Advertisements for the Dead," addresses the role of art in remembering and forgetting the dead by focusing on the works of Marc Lida and the NAMES Project Quilt. According to Weinberg, "Making great art involves constructing a suitable context for an audience, fitting into a historical or critical construct, establishing an audience, [and] forging a reputation and name."

• Nicky Chambers, Craig Simmons, and Mathis Wackernagel. Sharing Nature’s Interest: Ecological Footprints as an Indicator of Sustainability. Earthscan Publications, 2000.

The concept of ecological footprinting is gaining popularity not only with environmentalists, but in government and business circles as well. Not surprising, the United States’ average ecological footprint (hectare per capita) is the highest among the 52 countries studied in this book. The authors place the U.S. in the "Red Bulls" category: Nations attaining a high degree of competitiveness, but which operate beyond their ecological limits.  

Leslie Stebbins, Reference Librarian, will explain how to find out who has cited your published works and how often by using our Web of Science database.