Journal Storage for High Schools, Too

The original papers of Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin are all available in JSTOR, an online archive of peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Containing 322 academic journals in 26 disciplines, it's now being offered for the first time to secondary schools.

JSTOR introduces high school students to scholarly resources that they will likely find useful, if not essential, in college. The new resource is the result of a successful two-year pilot project conducted at 16 private and public schools. Initially, organizers worried that the archive would be over the heads of most students who were not in Advanced Placement courses. They were pleased to be wrong.

"I was surprised to discover that the level of difficulty was not beyond most of our students," says Phyllis DiBianco, a library media specialist at Scarsdale (NY) High School. She gave high marks to JSTOR for its solid tech support.

Adele Bildersee, director of libraries and information services at the Dalton School in New York City, says the archive helps students prepare for work on the university level.

Many pilot participants remarked that digitized articles are captured in faithful replication of the original 18th- and 19th-century documents. Those digitized pages cannot be cut, copied, or pasted.

See www.jstor.org for the fee schedule..