Widening MoDA’s Reach
Using Jstor's Open Community Collections platform to expand the impact of MoDA's digital resources well beyond our immediate community
Here at MoDA, we’re always asking how more people can find and use our collections – valuable primary source material for learning, teaching and research. So when we heard about Jstor’s Open Community Collections platform, we had to find out more! Jstor has long been known as a place to find academic articles and other scholarly works, but this platform aims to help students and researchers find primary source materials from libraries, museums and archives in the same place as secondary ones, like articles and ebooks.
Have a look at our landing page on Jstor: https://www.jstor.org/site/middlesex-university/. So far, we’ve contributed two collections.
Silver Studio katagami collection
This collection of 376 Katagami or Japanese stencils dates mainly from the early nineteenth century, and are among the sources of visual inspiration collected by the designers who worked for the Silver Studio.
This is the first time the entire collection of nearly 400 is available online.
We’ve also contributed the two albums of collotypes by Japanese photographer Kasumasa Ogawa that we have recently digitized.
We’re pleased that these Japanese materials are becoming more visible via Jstor, since they are of interest to researchers worldwide.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on user statistics to see how well this goes, before possibly adding more content. This is something of an experiment at this stage, but as the JSTOR platform includes full-text search, citation management tools, filtering and faceting, a IIIF-compliant viewer, content download and sharing, as well as being discoverable through Google indexing, EBSCO Discovery Service, OCLC, and ProQuest/Ex Libris, we really hope that this will be a way of raising the visibility and profile of our collections.
if you have questions or comments we’d love to hear from you – please email moda@mdx.ac.uk.