Technology choices for the JSTOR online archive

The rapid pace of technological advance forces system developers to evaluat e a constant succession of innovations: What new feature or capability shou ld be integrated into a working system? The ever-increasing power of hardwa re and software promises a perpetual stream of such decisions, as ever more powerful hardware becomes available. Started as a grant program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Foundati on's Journal Storage project (JSTOR) investigated the possibility of increa sing access to older scholarly materials by converting them to digital medi a. The authors describe the development of JSTOR and the implementation decisi ons they made and why they made them. Only by continually updating the tech nology, while retaining a clear sense of how this technology helps to bette r serve the core mission of JSTOR, can the resource's value continue.