In order to do a statistical run of data in 1978 I was pleased to have the opportunity to use the punch-card machines in the basement of the Bobst Library, and leave the stack of cards there for a couple of days to retire upstairs into the world-class collection of journals and texts while my computer calculations were completed by technicians. If I needed something that was not in the collection, a stellar library staff could usually get a copy within a week or two, during which a recycling truck would carry off the tons of used cards that NYU scholars had generated in their work. It was never necessary for me to correct my punch card errors more than three times, therefore taking mere days to do analysis of variance on a miniscule sample set.

Now, in the unlikely event I ever want to do statistical analysis again, I can start Mathematica, SPSS or Maple on my desktop and have results immediately sans punch cards. So, too, can I read major texts and journals from my office using the online services of JSTOR and MIT.

JSTOR

Originally a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR, Journal Storage: The Scholarly Journal Archive, is a not-for-profit organization that stores and delivers digital images of complete back issues of scholarly journals. Most major institutions subscribe to some JSTOR service. Since its mission is archival the issues lag behind publication, and one must find other sources for issues anywhere from one to five years back from the current publication date.

The organization offers products in the form of accessibility to “collections” of journals: “ Currently, participants who have all five Arts & Sciences Collections, the Health & General Sciences Collection, the Biological Sciences Collection and the Business II Collection have access to the entire JSTOR archive.” Participation fees are considerable. There is a trial account “ that enables a small number of staff at your institution to explore the complete JSTOR archive,” and some journal programs are available to individuals through their publishers.

JSTOR’s goals include:

1. To build a reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature

2. To improve dramatically access to these journals

3. To help fill gaps in existing library collections of journal back-files

4. To address preservation issues such as mutilated pages and long-term deterioration of paper copy

5. To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of journal collections

6. To assist scholarly associations and publishers in making the transition to electronic modes of publication

7. To study the impact of providing electronic access on the use of these scholarly materials

Item number seven would be of particular interest to a thriving membership organization of artists and scholars devoted to producing research into living traditions in art.

Information about JSTOR will be found here:

JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/

JSTOR Trial Account: http://www.jstor.org/

JSTOR Title List: http://www.jstor.org/about/all.list.html

Links to recent Content: http://www.jstor.org/about/recent-issues.html

JSTOR International Library Relations

149 Fifth Avenue, 8th Floor

New York, New York 10010

Email: participation@jstor.org

Phone: (212) 358-6400

Fax: (212) 358-6499

MIT

MIT provides access to a smaller, but current, collection of journals, which at this time includes:

• African Arts

• Artificial Life

• Asian Economic Papers

• Biological Theory

• Computational Linguistics

• Computer Music Journal

• Daedalus

• Design Issues

• Education Finance and Policy

• Evolutionary Computation

• Global Environmental Politics

• Grey Room

• Information Technologies and International Development

• Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization

• International Security

• Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

• Journal of Cold War Studies

• Journal of Industrial Ecology

• Journal of Interdisciplinary History

• Journal of Machine Learning Research

• Journal of the European Economic Association

• Leonardo

• Leonardo Music Journal

• Linguistic Inquiry

• NBER/Frontiers in Health Policy Research

• NBER/Innovation Policy and the Economy

• NBER/Macroeconomics Annual

• NBER/Tax Policy and the Economy

• Neural Computation

• Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology

• The New England Quarterly

• October

• PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

• Perspectives on Science

• Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments

• Quarterly Journal of Economics

• Review of Economics and Statistics

• TDR/The Drama Review

• Washington Quarterly

• World Policy Journal

In an ever-changing online universe any assertion applies only to the moment, so, having registered with the site, and sampled Leonardo to test the system, one finds that Leonardo volumes 1 through 32 are available at JSTOR, and volumes 32 through the volume 40, February, 2007 issue are listed as available at MIT. The February, 2007 issue page comes up with a contents page listing editorials, articles, etc., each of which is accessible as a pdf file. Articles which were sampled were complete, including one labeled “free,” although seemingly neither more nor less free than others, which was of particular interest: "The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran," by Robert Gluck.

Regarding Leonardo, and of interest to artist/researchers, is an ongoing call for papers to this remarkable journal.

Equally as interesting as the availability of these periodicals is the MIT Open Courseware Project, that makes the course materials used in the teaching of almost all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. These are not online courses, but materials and references to materials used in courses. The MIT project participates with numerous distinguished institutions worldwide in the Open Courseware Symposium:

“An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.”

Information on MIT and these matters can be found at:

MIT Press Journals: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/?cookieSet=1

Leonardo: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/leon

Leonardo: http://leonardo.info/

Leonardo Call for Papers: http://leonardo.info/isast/journal/call.html

MIT Open Courseware Project: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Open Courseware Symposium: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

OCW Members: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/about/members.shtml

MIT Press Journals

tel. 617 253 2889

fax. 617 577 1545

journals-orders@mit.edu