JSTOR is a website I frequent regularly, as I am sure most students within the humanities do. JSTOR is a massive digital database of scholarly articles and primary sources (apparently books are to be added soon), and its audience is essentially for educational purposes. The right side of the front page further explains, "JSTOR connects libraries, researchers, teachers, and students around the world with vital scholarly content in more than 50 disciplines." This is fantastic, but there is one downside to JSTOR: it has limited access. The only way I can enter JSTOR is through UNC Charlotte's online library system, as a student. Someone who cannot access JSTOR through an affiliated
institution as I have must pay to create an account.
Just by glancing at JSTOR's main page, one's eyes are immediately drawn to the dominating search bar. Surely this is intentional, since searching JSTOR's community of digital articles and sources is the ultimate feature of the website. While this simple search is offered, one can also perform an advanced search, which allows a significant amount of specificity.
The search techniques provided (which also allow Boolean phrases and such) are exactly what is needed for scholars to sift through this massive database. Once an item is located, let's say a journal article, JSTOR offers additional selections. An article can be viewed as a page scan, PDF, or summary. While different mediums are available to read articles, all text is searchable. The database would be almost useless if everything were not largely searchable. As seen below, there are many options provided for citation and convenient features on the right side of the page. The ability to view the author's references and other items related to the selected article are notable. With such easy-to-use functionality, research is greatly simplified yet also expanded, making JSTOR an extremely helpful and efficient tool.
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| JSTOR Web Page of a Selected Article |
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