“New Times Always, Old Time we Cannot Keep”

Abstract

“New Times Always; Old Time We Cannot Keep” William G. Bowen Remarks at Annual Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries October 26, 2005 It was 10 years ago, in October 1995, that I spoke at an ARL gathering here in Washington on “JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication.” If I recall correctly, at the conclusion of that highly speculative talk I presented Duane Webster with a tee-shirt that had on it the words “Free the Bound Periodicals.” Amazingly, that is what JSTOR has done in considerable measure—though, as always, there is much more to accomplish. In addition to continuing to add important new content, JSTOR is now contemplating ways of making parts of its content more accessible to public search engines, providing more access to users in the developing world as well as to users unaffiliated with an academic institution, cross-linking articles in the database, and helping the scholarly community find a viable way of archiving born-electronic content. As you know so well, much has happened in these 10 years, at your libraries and throughout the world of scholarly communication. My objective today is to reflect on some of the big issues we have encountered over this decade and to share some of the lessons we think we have learned along the way, often with the help of people in this room. Those lessons have been drawn from practical experience with a series of “natural experiments,” and so today I intend to sketch, ever so briefly, what has happened not only to the JSTOR infant whose fate we pondered together 10 years ago, but also what is happening with its digital progeny, ARTstor and Ithaka, that JSTOR helped inspire. Ithaka, led by Kevin Guthrie, is now busily engaged in