The University of Tennessee at Martin has joined the Tier 3 charter program of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services and is adopting JSTOR’s integrated digital collections platform.
JSTOR – short for “Journal Storage” – was founded in 1995 and is a nonprofit digital library that provides access to academic journals, books, research reports and primary resources. JSTOR Stewardship is a modern digital collections platform designed to help institutions maximize the impact of their distinctive materials.
As a Tier 3 charter participant, UT Martin’s Paul Meek Library will gain access to JSTOR Seeklight, the AI-assisted collections processing tool within JSTOR Stewardship, while also joining a community of institutions helping to shape the future of responsible, scalable digital collections work.
JSTOR’s professional migration team has moved existing digital materials to JSTOR Stewardship to create a new UT Martin landing page. This cloud-hosted platform brings together digital asset management, long-term preservation and expanded discovery pathways – including sharing on JSTOR – in one environment.
The move will help UT Martin strengthen support for a wide range of distinctive collections, including special collections and archives content, photographs, oral histories and other regional historical manuscripts.
In addition, the new platform will expand the campus institutional repository which collects, preserves and shares research, scholarship and creative works of students, faculty and staff.
“Moving to JSTOR Stewardship provides an exciting opportunity to bring our distinctive materials into a single, robust environment,” said Dr. Erik Nordberg, dean of the Paul Meek Library at UT Martin. “The platform’s integrated AI-assisted descriptive tools are critical for mid-sized institutions like ours.”
By assisting with time-intensive collections processing tasks, JSTOR Seeklight can help redirect staff capacity to expand faculty engagement, collaborate with regional heritage partners and support public humanities projects.
“Bringing our collections into the expansive and active JSTOR community will boost global visibility, accessibility and long-term preservation of UT Martin’s collections,” said Nordberg. “Joining as a charter member gives us the chance to collaborate with peer institutions and JSTOR in shaping the future of digital collections. My career began in the archives, and what JSTOR Stewardship offers is truly transformational.”
Jessica Clemons, the JSTOR director of business development, said that UT Martin is seeking to increase the accessibility and discoverability of its scholarship and distinctive collections.
“The university is growing its reputation as a regional university, and the Paul Meek Library is positioning itself to support regional digitization initiatives across West Tennessee,” she said. “They needed modern infrastructure to support these goals, and they carefully evaluated JSTOR Stewardship as the ideal tool to support the real complexity of their digital collections over time.”
For more information about UT Martin’s Paul Meek Library, visit www.utm.edu/library.
For more information about UT Martin, visit www.utm.edu or call 1-800-829-UTM1 (-8861).
PHOTO: Shown is the UT Martin Student Life Center, originally called the Physical Education Building when it was constructed in 1929. The photo is on file with the JSTOR digital storage site.
