Technology choices for the JSTOR online archive

The rapid pace of technological advance forces system developers to evaluate a constant succession of innovations: what new feature or capability should be integrated into a working system. The ever-increasing power of hardware and software promises a perpetual stream of such decisions, as ever more powerful hardware becomes available. Started as a grant program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Foundation's Journal Storage project (JSTOR) investigated the possibility of increasing access to older scholarly materials by converting them to digital media. The authors describe the development of JSTOR and the implementation decisions they made and why they made them. Only by continually updating the technology, while retaining a clear sense of how this technology helps to better serve the core mission of JSTOR, can the resource's value continue.