JSTOR: Trove of Scholarly Journals
How does original scholarship happen? Academics conduct experiments in laboratories, gather data out in the field, and research the arguments of their precursors and contemporaries in the library. Traditionally, universities have housed most of these activities, because of the substantial facilities and resources they can provide. Nothing is ever likely to replace laboratory or field work, but modern libraries can harness the power of the internet to connect students and teachers outside of universities to the world of scholarly discourse, as published in academic journals.
Working with Berkshire School’s academic departments, The Geier Library has acquired access to JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/, an online database of more than 1000 academic journals, containing literally millions of peer-reviewed articles, images, reviews, and primary sources. The range of topics is incredibly diverse, from traditional secondary-school subjects like language and literature (254 journals) to professional fields like finance (20 journals), and even to highly specific and arcane topics, such as Slavic Studies (18 journals) and music theory (3 journals). There are titles for the ‘hard’ sciences such as zoology (65 journals), social sciences like economics (147 journals), and even journals written in languages other than English, such as Historia Mexicana and Cahiers d’Études Africaines.
Facilitating access to these important resources, the Geier Library will help teachers and students conduct research relevant to their courses, from American history papers on the Whiskey Rebellion to independent study projects on African economies, from performances of Shakespeare in light of staging traditions to analytical essays on postmodern interpretations of Virginia Woolf. Students in sustainability courses can explore energy policy, just as students in linear algebra can read up on recent findings in The American Journal of Mathematics. Finally, access to JSTOR can help our whole community learn, allowing busy teachers the ability to deepen their subject knowledge without ever leaving campus.
Visit JSTOR today (www.jstor.org) for a glimpse of what is now available to Berkshire students!
-- Evan Clary, English Department Chair
and all-boys prep school outside of Boston, for a 1-day mini-symposium on Student Biomedical Research. The goal was to foster collaboration, communication and community outreach with our students. AMSR students Liza Bernstein '13, Sissi Wang '13, Lars Robinson '13, Elsie Guevara '13, Ernest Yue '13, and Nate MacKenzie '14, gave short talks about their work in the new Bellas/Dixon Math and Science lecture hall. The talks were followed up by break-out sessions where Belmont Hill students described their research projects and students discussed commonalities between the projects and future goals.
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