The college where I teach now finally has access to JSTOR, which is, far and away, my favorite literary research database. It’s a beautiful thing. In fact, it’s the only literary research database whose developers seem to care about presentation as well as functionality. It’s stylish. And the results you get through it are not some crappy HTML-ified, text-only version of the article. They’re nice scans of the real deal, yet they load quickly and are easy to read. They’re also full of metadata, so JSTOR highlights appearances of your search terms and even provides links to every page in the article that contains at least one of your terms.
I know it’s probably not a selling point, for most people, to note that using JSTOR is close to the experience–the good part of it, anyway–of doing research in a real, well-stocked library. But that’s exactly what makes it great. If you’re enough of a nerd to find that appealing, check it out. It’s too expensive for most independent scholars, but your local college library probably subscribes to it.
One of the things that makes JSTOR so cool is that the search results encourage browsing, which, as any researcher knows, is often how you stumble across cool things. Say you search on “Hemingway Snows of Kilimanjaro” (as I did, last night, while banging out a lecture on that same story). You get a listing of articles that match, of course. But, beneath the link to each article, you also have links to the particular issue from which it came and also the particular journal that published it. So, if you stumble across a special issue on Hemingway that might be relevant, even though it doesn’t match your specific search terms, you can browse right over to it.
JSTOR uses PDF for printing and as an accessibility workaround. You can save copies of articles to PDF (in keeping with fair use policies), though the whole application is designed to encourage online browsing. And it does that very well.
Most academic research databases (like ProQuest or EBSCOHost) do a good enough job of getting articles online and searchable. Unfortunately, what they also do is create a user experience you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy–one where presentation is an afterthought and the designers, such as they are, spend all their time on the search algorithms.
Browsing through the stacks–especially the journal stacks–is nerdy fun at best, but there’s no reason to drain what fun there is out of it. JSTOR doesn’t just preserve the text of the article, it also preserves the typography, the images, and the layout (including the footnotes, just as they were originally published). I submit to you that a big part of the fun of researching a topic is the physicality of the media in which the knowledge is preserved, not just the content itself. Content is king, of course, but digging through dusty books printed in antiquated fonts is part of the fun. Research databases can take a lot of the pain out of research, but, too often, they take out the pleasure as well. JSTOR is the best I’ve found at minimizing what sucks about research and maintaining what’s fun (yeah, I said “fun”) about it.
NB: Revised and greatly expanded on 11/15/2007
JSTOR is good, except that it is restricted to institutions that subscribe to it. My school has only a partial subscription, so almost everything I need is beyond my access.
Well, that’s true of all walled-garden research databases (which is to say, most research databases). The differences in subscription levels are a legitimate concern, though. I have access to JSTOR via two different institutions. One of them gets me most everything I need. The other is often of little help.
JSTOR is expensive, or so I hear, but it’s also incredibly good. So, if you like it and want it, you really have to be a cheerleader for it on your campus, so the powers-that-be can justify subscribing to it in full.