Friends of the Sojourner Truth Library donate $14,000 for prestigious scholarly database

NEW PALTZ — This fall, research capabilities at the Sojourner Truth Library (STL) on the campus at New Paltz have been enhanced through the addition of JSTOR, a prestigious electronic research database typically found at large research universities.

What made this database a reality at New Paltz was a donation by the Friends of the Sojourner Truth Library to cover the $14,000 JSTOR annual subscription fee. This is the largest single item ever supported with the Friends contributions. To date, Friends donors have made it possible for the library to purchase more than 1,600 books, reference sets, audio and video recordings, musical scores, and electronic information media.

“The funding of the JSTOR annual subscription by the Friends of the Sojourner Truth Library is an excellent example of how Friend’s contributions provide for a ‘Margin of Excellence’ in the services provided to the college and the community,” said Paul Brown, chair of the Friends steering committee. “In this case, the library can choose to provide an outstanding electronic resource without sacrificing the continuing purchase of traditional books for the collection.”

Chui-chun Lee, director of the library, said that subscribing to JSTOR is an important contribution to the academic community. “It significantly enriches both collection development and information access services at Sojourner Truth Library,” Lee said. “JSTOR is an excellent complement to the library’s many other research databases, as their online content is generally limited to articles published within the last 10 years.”

Steven Poskanzer, president of SUNY New Paltz, said, “JSTOR is an exceptionally important database, particularly for people in the humanities and social sciences. I’m delighted that the Friends of the Library were able to provide the campus with this critical research tool.”

The mission of JSTOR is to digitize entire runs of scholarly journals for the purpose of preservation and the provision of online access to the journal content for researchers. It provides a complete digitized archive of core scholarly journals, in most cases starting with the very first issue and continuing up to 3-5 years old. Many journals are available from early in the 20th century. The full content of every journal issue is provided as a high-resolution image, each article appearing as it was originally published.

JSTOR offers approximately 400 journal titles in six subject areas: arts & sciences, business, ecology & botany, general science, language & literature, and music.

Founded in 1997, The Friends of the Sojourner Truth Library is an association of faculty, students, alumni, and community and business persons dedicated to promoting and enhancing the library as a shared resource. Its mission is to support a library of distinction — a regional center of research and scholarship — through a variety of fundraising activities to provide an extra margin of excellence above and beyond that which can be achieved through conventional institutional funding.

Since inception, the Friends has raised over $125,000, contributions which enable the Library to enrich its collection of books and other materials essential to learning and inquiry. Friends-sponsored activities include organizing membership drives, semi-annual used book sales, and periodic gatherings and celebrations. The organization currently has close to 250 members. For information on joining the Friends of the Sojourner Truth Library, contact Chui-chun Lee, director of the library, at (845) 257-3719.

For more information about the STL, visit http://lib.newpaltz.edu.

For more information about JSTOR, go to www.jstor.org/about.