JSTOR rant

The most important thing to rant about is that I have access to this and many other online full-text journal resources, while many of my colleagues at other institutions do not, but that will not stop me from ranting about user interface matters.

Bullets of JSTOR stupidity:

• If I want to access JSTOR at all, I must go to my library home page; try to decide whether to click "articles" or "databases"'; having correctly chosen the latter, find that JSTOR is not in any of the disciplinarily-categorized database lists; click on "A-Z list of Databases", scroll to J, and log in with my university ID. Why four clicks before I even get to the screen where I can search?
• JSTOR has changed its interface. It has become prettier, but now, instead of being able to click on an article title in the search results and being taken to a page of download options for that article, one is given a "PDF" button that spawns a popup containing some kind of user agreement. FOR EVERY SEPARATE GODDAM ARTICLE ONE WANTS TO LOOK AT IN A WHOLE SEARCH. Clicking ok on the user agreement (which of course I have not read, because I want to get the goddam popup out of the way of my search as quickly as possible) automatically starts the PDF download. There is no way to force the PDF to open in a new tab (if it is to be displayed in the browser) or to download as a file, because control-clicking the PDF box in the search results causes the popup user agreement to be downloaded as a file. Clcking the PDF box and then OK in the popup results in two new open windows spawned for each hit one wants to pursue.
• There are no stable urls for JSTOR articles, so if I want to send a friend or student a link to an article, we're both s.o.l. and s/he has to search from scratch, like I did. Life is too short to click that many times.
• Meanwhile, if JSTOR articles show up in a Google search, as they so often do, and I click on that link, JSTOR tells me I am not authorized to access the article, despite the fact that I AM LOGGED INTO JSTOR IN ANOTHER TAB OF THE SAME BROWSER RIGHT NOW. If I click "log in", I am taken to a login screen that has nothing to do with authenticating with the i.d. I use at the university library's site.

/rant

Comments

[Janice]

Wow. Your library's got things set up weird. I'm in JSTOR right now and if I click on an article title from search results, I'm taken to a page with the article info at top, a range of options (save citation, PDF, etc.) and the image of the first page of the article.

Of course, I'm accessing from on-campus, mind you, but still. No agreement window popping up. No auto-download of PDF.

And if you click on "Article Information" from that page, you get the stable URL that you should be able to pass to a colleague, e.g. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004445

If I were you, I'd phone up your institutional librarians in charge of JSTOR and ask what's up with their implementation of off-site access to the database! Sympathies, in any case.

[Thoroughly Educated]

Aha. Ok. I have found the stable url on the article information page, but when I try to use it, I am back in the same quandary as when I try to get in through Google: JSTOR doesn't recognize me as logged in if I haven't burrowed in through the library's home page. I will rant (politely) to the appropriate librarians.

I am off campus, but I've had the same issues from on campus.

When you're on the page that you got to from clicking on the article title, do you have a set of options in the upper right hand corner that reads Save Citation - Article Information - PDF? It's when I click on that PDF button that I get the terms of use popup.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Are you sure it's not a Safari issue?

[Thoroughly Educated]

Could be, but *resume rant* as far as I'm concerned, if an interface doesn't work properly with Safari, that's a problem to be solved at the provider's end - especially as we're talking about a library on a Mac-centric campus.

[Thoroughly Educated]

Update: the annoying terms-of-use popup situation is exactly the same in Firefox.

[The Cranky Professor]

It's not Safari - it's true of Firefox on the Mac, too. I think it's institutional. My library does the same thing...we use a product called Voyager but I'm not certain that's the universal name for it. Ooogh.