Ten Surprising Things You Can Enjoy Online, Thanks to JSTOR

William G. Bowen, then-president of the Mellon Foundation, proposed a bold solution: What if journals weren’t stored on-site at all, but were digitized and preserved online? Practically speaking, moving journals online would save shelf space and cut storage costs. Google didn’t exist yet, but user-friendly web browsers were just emerging, opening up possibilities for more people to access these resources digitally. The project became known as JSTOR, short for Journal Storage. 

“People really didn't use the journals very much. It was very hard to find an older article because there really weren't ways to get to them,” says Kevin Guthrie, a co-founder of JSTOR. “The concept was, we can scan them and make them digital.” 

JSTOR started as a pilot project to digitize key economics and history journals. In 1995, it to became an independent nonprofit organization whose mission was to advance and preserve knowledge through digital technologies, helping to democratize scholarly dialogue in the process. 

“We had to create all the technology,” says Guthrie. “When we launched over the period from roughly 1997 to 1999, you saw the takeoff of the web happen right alongside as we were building this new collection. That timing was extremely fortunate for us because then people started getting connected.” 

Today, the global digital archive is an essential tool for researchers, students, journalists, and many others. Its growing collections span academic journals, books, primary sources, images, and more, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. Now part of the nonprofit  ITHAKA, JSTOR serves over 14,000 libraries across 190 countries. Its collections include more than 2,800 journals, upwards of 13 million articles, and millions of images and primary sources. 

“There are many ways that JSTOR is useful for research, teaching, and learning that we couldn't have even hoped for or wished for back in the day,” says Guthrie, who is also a co-founder and current president of ITHAKA. “We’ve tried to maximize the impact for the community.” 

Whether you're an educator, writer, or just a curious browser, JSTOR is a treasure trove of interesting materials for you to explore. Here are 10 types of content you might be surprised to discover there.

For artists, designers, art students, and others, JSTOR’s Artstor has millions of high-quality videos and images of art, architecture, and more from museums and archives around the world. Artstor’s 300-plus collections include everything from Native American art from the Smithsonian’s collection to architectural plans from Columbia University. 

“While Artstor is revered for its monographic collections of heavyweight modernists such as Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, being able to really go down the rabbit hole of the works spanning the career of an artist like Ion Bitzan feels incredibly exciting,” says Lisa Gavell, curator of Artstor. “These works simply don’t live elsewhere on the internet in any kind of organized, well-considered, or, most importantly, estate-sanctioned way.”

Musicians and music lovers can explore JSTOR’s rich collection of music resources, which includes over 70 journals and more than 50 academic ebooks covering topics such as musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. You’ll find titles like Folk Music Journal, Music in Art, and The Black Perspective in Music. 

For educators, JSTOR offers a vast array of teaching resources, such as toolkits, ready-to-use syllabi, curated content collections, webinars, and more. Teaching tools like Workspace help keep sources and citations organized, while an AI research tool is offered “to enhance—not replace—the research process.” Through JSTOR’s active collaborator program, educators can add their own tried-and-tested materials to an open library. 

“JSTOR’s teaching resources are vital because they help educators save time, strengthen student engagement, and diversify classroom content,” says Victoria Spitz, senior digital marketing manager at JSTOR.

For Spanish speakers, JSTOR has more than 1,000 open-access books from Latin America as part of its growing collection of over 13,000 open-access scholarly books across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Popular Spanish-language books include The History of Reading in Mexico and The Media in History.

Botanists and plant enthusiasts can browse JSTOR’s Global Plants collection, the world’s largest database of digitized plant specimens. Containing nearly 3 million high-resolution images of specimens and related materials from institutions worldwide, Global Plants features sub-collections like Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa and historic illustrations from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. 

“Plant specimens live in herbaria all over the world. By digitizing them and bringing them together centrally, Global Plants enables researchers to access them from anywhere and draw connections across them, including over time,” says John Lenahan, vice president of published content for JSTOR.

Incarcerated learners seeking higher education can access JSTOR’s extensive library of scholarly resources through the JSTOR Access in Prison initiative. Launched in 2007, the platform operates in all 50 U.S. states as a tool to help improve educational outcomes for people in prisons and jails. Currently, more than a million incarcerated students can access, download, and read academic journal articles, books, and other materials via the platform, which is specially configured to meet state and federal standards for security. 

“JSTOR Access in Prison is crucial for people who are incarcerated to have the opportunity to engage in academic research, fostering personal growth and skill development,” says Stacy Burnett, senior project manager of the program.

Avid book readers can dive into more than 158,000 ebooks from top scholarly publishers on JSTOR, including peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes from university presses. While most books require institutional access, JSTOR’s Path to Open program is partnering with publishers, authors, and libraries to make more books freely accessible. Nearly 50 university presses and hundreds of authors and libraries are already part of the program, with titles ranging from The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century and Nuclear Decolonization to The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education.  

For those interested in exploring a range of perspectives, Reveal Digital offers collections of primary sources from underrepresented voices of dissent. The initiative uses a crowdfunding model, collaborating with libraries to fund, source, digitize, and publish these materials. Standout collections include The Ella P. Stewart Scrapbooks, offering insights on pioneering Black women civil rights activists, and American Prison Newspapers, which features hundreds of publications produced in prisons, with a focus on women’s institutions. 

“Reveal Digital’s work ensures that future generations of teachers, learners, and individuals can engage with a fuller, more accurate record of the past—one that includes the struggles, ideas, and cultural contributions of communities that were historically excluded,” says Peggy Glahn, associate director of the initiative.

For historians, researchers, and students looking for primary sources, JSTOR provides pathways to access thousands of freely available, locally held collections. Curated by libraries, museums, and archives operating across the globe, these materials range from diaries and student newspapers to Hong Kong travel posters and The Spiritualist, a British newspaper covering the spiritualist movement in the 1800s.

For those wanting a selection of fun and thoughtful stories grounded in scholarship, JSTOR Daily connects current events and cultural topics to academic research, with articles linking to free sources available on JSTOR. From quirky histories and curated reading lists to teaching resources and even a “plant of the month,” JSTOR Daily brings together some of the platform’s most compelling content, with the option of having it delivered right to your inbox.