JSTOR has launched a new Labs team charged with
partnering with libraries and scholars to build innovative
tools for research and teaching. The JSTOR Labs team has
successfully used ‘flash builds’ – high-intensity, short-burst,
user-driven development efforts – in order to bring an idea
from conception to a working, user-delighting prototype in
as little as a week. In this talk the presenter will describe
the approach to flash builds, highlight the partnerships,
skills, tools and content that help to innovate, and suggest
ways that libraries can adopt these methods to support
innovation and the digital humanities.
On National Teacher Day, meet the 2024-25 Kenan Fellows
Of Libraries and Labs: Effecting User-Driven Innovation
1. OF LIBRARIES & LABS:
EFFECTING USER-DRIVEN INNOVATION
11-12 April 2016
Alex Humphreys, JSTOR Labs
@abhumphreys
UKSG Annual Conference 2016
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.
10. WORKING
WITH TOPICS
• JSTOR Thesaurus: a controlled vocabulary
w/ 48,000+ unique terms
• 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
• Next up: incorporate into primary JSTOR
site
• New “Sustainability collection” for libraries,
consisting of new-to-JSTOR journals and
research reports
• Extend beyond Sustainability
https://public.tableau.com/profile/beth.dufford#!/vizhome/JSTORSustainabilityTopics/Story1
12. PARTNERSHIP
WITH FOLGER
• Open, collaborative partnership with Folger
Shakespeare Library
• Folger had:
- Shakespeare Quarterly
- Folger Digital Texts
- Scholars and students
• JSTOR had:
- Full run of SQ
- 2,000 more journals
- A new Labs team
• Flash Build - September, 2014:
- From ideation to working site
- One week at the Folger in DC
14. MATCHMAKER
ALGORITHM
• Quotation-finding algorithm that powers
Understanding Shakespeare
• Open and public API to all Understanding
Shakespeare data
• In progress:
- Apply Matchmaker to other texts (e.g. U.S.
Constitution, Divine Comedy)
- Generic Matchmaker API
labs.jstor.org/developers
20. Prior to the Flash Build
1. User interviews
2. Create the data & infrastructure
During the Flash Build
3. Design jam
4. Paper prototypes
5. Low-fi prototypes
6. Working site
After the Flash Build
7. Polish & clean up
8. Release & measure
WHAT WE LEARN, WHEN
User Input!
Who are they?
What can we
do that will
help them?
How can we make
our implementation
even better?
How should we
implement it?
How’d we do?
23. 2. It’s nice to hear someone say,
“Ohmigod, this is amazing!”
24. 3. If you go fast enough, you can
help people break out of old patterns.
25. 4. This work suggests better ways
to support digital humanities:
- tools and content together
- a model for partnering with scholars
- lower barrier of entry to DH
- start your own lab, adopt these practices in an
existing team, or find a partner*
* Like JSTOR Labs!
26. THANK YOU
Alex Humphreys
Director, JSTOR Labs
ITHAKA
http://labs.jstor.org
@abhumphreys
alex.humphreys@ithaka.org
Further Reading
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• Business Model Generation,
Osterwalder & Pigneur
• Marty Cagan’s Blog: svpg.com/articles
• Sprint, Knapp, Zeratsky, & Kowitz
28. 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
29. 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
30. 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
31. 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.
- Flexible technology that allows for componentization and continuous deployment- A safe-space to fail- Ability to focus
Not judgmental. You learn more, and you can bring people along better when there is a real thing you can point at together.
We do what we do not for money, but feeling of contribution – it is great to witness that directly.
More importantly: it raises the standards, helps us see how much mediocrity there really is out there.
Lower barrier to entry with easier UXprovide skills to help scholars who might not have technical skills
The core of what we’re building is a set of at least 130 journals drawn from a range of disciplines. If you’re familiar with the JSTOR Arts & Sciences collections, you can think of this the same way, but with a tighter focus. We’ll have journals in Economics, Law, Technology, and of course Environmental and Population Studies, but all focused on issues in sustainability.
We’ll also be including grey literature, which we’ve heard from both scholars and libraries is important to the field, yet can often be difficult to locate.
This collection builds off the existing content on JSTOR…we already have a base of more than 200k relevant articles that provide additional support beyond the journals we’re signing specifically for this collection
And, beyond the content, we’re testing out a set of tools to help researchers discover and navigate this literature.