Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Something To Be Thankful For

Today is the American holiday, Thanksgiving, where people gather with their families to eat way too much rich food and think about the good things in their lives for which they should be thankful.

Yesterday, I learned about something research-related for which to give thanks. JSTOR, a huge online database of academic articles, decided in September to begin gradually making its collection available freely on line to anyone with Internet access. Formerly, JSTOR articles were only available for free to graduate students and academics whose universities are JSTOR members. The embedded video explains how to use JSTOR's advanced search page to locate material that may be of interest.


At present, general free access is limited to articles published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere in the world, but JSTOR's plan is clearly to expand that base over time.

JSTOR is an incredibly powerful tool as it includes access to the contents of many academic journals. (Many of the most interesting articles pearl has found for me were found through her JSTOR access.) The opportunity to begin to tap that well of knowledge is truly something to be thankful for.

2 comments:

  1. Oooh! Yay! Thank you for pointing this out! And of course the early articles are the ones I really want to see ;-)

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  2. Then you have a wealth of fun ahead of you. I did find an interesting early article which examined ancient Greek pottery and gave a breakdown of how many times particular types of women's costume was depicted in the pottery collections available to the author. Likely I'll find more interesting things as I have more time to look.

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