The Dartmouth library will soon begin removing old print issues of scholarly journals that are also available on the online archive JSTOR from its collection, according to Elizabeth Kirk, associate librarian for information resources. The initiative aims to address storage space shortages and decrease the library's storage costs.
"There is a problem with space in just about every research library in the United States," Kirk said. "There is so much information the faculty and students need that almost everyone has run out of space, especially due to the explosion of information that has been published in the last 30 years."
Dartmouth's collections currently include 917 journals that are also on JSTOR.
Aside from on-campus library facilities, Dartmouth owns a remote shelving unit located near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, but the building is almost full, Kirk said.
The library's project began within the last six months following discussions between dean of libraries Jeff Horrell and the Council on Libraries, a group of faculty appointed by the College president. The library is collecting feedback from each department, Kirk said. Departmental librarians will examine every journal eligible for removal and communicate with the faculty in that department to determine whether anyone objects to discarding the older issues.
Library administrators have not yet decided what to do with the removed journals, Kirk said, explaining that the they will likely not be destroyed.
"If it is economically feasible, and we could find a library that would benefit from having these journals, we would much prefer to give them a second life or another set of library users," Kirk said.
Removing print copies of journals from the library has some disadvantages, government professor Lucas Swaine said.
"Research is best facilitated by actually going to see the volumes and being able to page through them and have them at hand, as opposed to merely having them on screen," Swaine said. "Many of the journals on JSTOR contain a significant historical record of fantastic scholarship. They really shouldn't be destroyed."
Swaine and government department chair William Wohlforth said JSTOR is a useful tool because it facilitates rapid searches of extensive material. Still, they expressed concerns about JSTOR's functionality.
"The chief disadvantage is the tedious nature of browsing," Wohlforth said. "If the researcher is interested in revealing the table of contents, on JSTOR it is a slower process than if you have the journals and can just page through them."
Documents on JSTOR are often scanned incorrectly, and sometimes parts of the page are missing, Swaine said, adding that a technology failure could potentially lead to the loss of the electronic materials.
JSTOR has redundant data centers to store CD-ROM and tape copies of articles, according to the organization's web site. JSTOR also maintains print copies of most of its uploaded journals in the California Digital Library or Harvard University Depository.
Removing some of the bulky journals stored in the stacks in Baker-Berry Library will allow students to browse more easily and find books that would otherwise be hidden by the large volumes of journals, Kirk said.
"If you move some of these journals out of the way, you can find a lot of the books that would normally be lost on the shelf," Kirk said. "It is like any good forest or garden; you don't want to plant things too close together that they don't get enough sunlight."
Other institutions are facing similar storage problems, as almost 50 percent of respondents to a 2003 JSTOR survey said they had already discarded journals included on JSTOR or had plans to discard journals in the near future.
Princeton University plans to keep all of its print copies of journals currently also available on JSTOR, but will most likely move them to a large storage unit jointly owned by Columbia University and the New York Public Library.
Kirk said she believes that JSTOR helps institutions keep up with the evolution of technology and dissemination of scholarly information.
"If Daniel Webster were writing a diary today, he would probably be writing it as a blog," Kirk said.
JSTOR was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to help institutions handle space constraints, according to the organization's web site.
