Welcome

We're pleased to announce the opening of the showcase, where JSTOR's advanced technology team are bringing their projects into the bright light of day for the first time.

This is not just from JSTOR -- we recognize that innovation is taking place everywhere, and so much of what appears here comes from collaborations with partners elsewhere in the community.

Our role is advancing research and bringing you the tools and facilities that you need, so let us know how we can help you. Whether you need access to data from JSTOR, or have tools that you would like to share that make using JSTOR easier, or want to request tools, we will do our best to help

just to let you know what a few of the things that we are up to

• We're working with partners in Germany and Canada to make the job of digitizing dramatically easier, using cameras and state-of-the-art document understanding we hope to make it possible to get paper into real digital documents as easy as pressing a button.  This is a hard problem and we'll report on progress  over the next year.
• With partners from across the globe, we're looking at ways to make it easy to annotate almost anything, anywhere and anyhow and to seamlessly share those annotations between platforms and colleagues.
• We're looking at ways to make our image resources more useful -- we'd like to become a workbench as well as a bookshelf. That includes the extensive plants database and document images as well as the wide ranging collection of images from the journal collection.
• As you can see elsewhere on this showcase, we're trying to expose data in useful ways for corpus analysis and mining.  Go check out the Data for Research facility here on Showcase and at http://dfr.jstor.org .
• We've got tools that allow you to use OAI-ORE over the JSTOR collections. 
• We're trying to develop ways of exposing the structure of the JSTOR collections by analyzing relationships over time and presenting them graphically. That is a particularly rich vein and we'd welcome any suggestions or contributions on how to compare or relate items in the collection and how to present or analyze the structure.

Not everything we work on will make it into the Showcase, and not everything that appears on Showcase will make it onto the main JSTOR site. This is, after all, where we work with fellow researchers and not everything works out (or even works), but it is a place where you can see and contribute to our shared future.

On which note, if you want to meet some of us in person we will be attending various conferences over the year, the next of which is OAH in Seattle on March 26^th to 28^th. We'll be at the JSTOR booth, so come by and share your thoughts with us.

-john burns