Three Cheers for JSTOR!

Research! In-depth research, a vital and somewhat feared component of the college environment, is actually your closest friend when you are trying to turn in your best work to a professor. A good mantra for the student is “Know your topic - Improve your work”. The best way to know your topic – research. You shouldn’t let it frighten you or spur on your procrastination gene because as an NHTI student you have a world of information right at your fingertips. I’m not talking about Google or Wikipedia (which I am assured by people in the know, is not a reliable source for your research purposes). No, I am referring to one of the many great databases available on the NHTI Library’s website – JSTOR.

JSTOR was conceived by William Bowen in 1994 as a way to help university and college libraries fix a library space shortage due to a seemingly never-ending amount of published scholarly work. His plan to reduce costs, free physical space and improve availability of research material was to turn it all into a digital format. And JSTOR was born. Ok, it wasn’t as easy as that, but we are going to skip ahead to the good stuff.

JSTOR contains full-text articles of over 2, 600 academic journals covering the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences. It is a great place to start your research for that upcoming project, paper, or that dreaded oral report (insert ominous theme music here). On top of the wealth of knowledge available to you, it is also easy to use.

The link to JSTOR is located on the Library's Database page and then under either Education, Literature, Social Science or Visual Arts. Click on the link, enter your easy login/password and you are ready to begin. You can do a very basic search by typing a topic in search box or more detailed search by clicking the advanced search option just below the box. A helpful hint – put exact phrases in quotation marks to narrow down your results. You can further restrict your results by choosing media type (books, articles, reviews), language, publication date, title, or even narrow down journals by discipline (ethics, art, computers, agriculture, history and many more). Once you have your results you can view the information, download it or save it. There is even a button to cite the material. One stop shopping at its best!

When it’s time to start that research project drop into JSTOR to help get you started on the way to your ‘A’ paper. Don’t forget to utilize all the options offered to the NHTI student- the physical books and journals housed at the NHTI Library, the vast knowledge and experience of our own Sarah Hebert, the various other databases located on our Library website, and the excellent help of the Writing Center at the Academic Center for Excellence.