A guide to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services for Forum participants

JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services is a tiered framework designed to streamline digital collection management and expand tools for cataloging, preservation, metadata management, and more. In this guide, you'll find a preview of the new experience and key changes for users of JSTOR Forum to be aware of when working in JSTOR Stewardship.

Key dates

What do I need to do?

No immediate action is required, but here are some things you can do now to prepare.

Register for our upcoming educational webinar

Register for "Navigating your transition from Forum to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services” (July 15, 2025 at 11am Eastern)

Join us for a 45-minute webinar, appropriate for current participants of JSTOR Forum, to learn about your institution’s transition from Forum to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services and what you need to know about the updated platform. We’ll cover recent improvements to the interface and navigation, as well as highlight a few new features.

Update your Forum OAI base URL (if applicable)

For institutions that have set up one or more Forum OAI publishing targets and/or harvest records from the Forum OAI server, please note that the Forum OAI URL (http://oai.forum.jstor.org/oai/) will eventually be retired.

We encourage all users of the Forum OAI to update their OAI base URL in their harvesting software to the JSTOR Stewardship OAI URL (http://oai.stewardship.jstor.org/oai/) before the transition date.

The JSTOR Stewardship OAI URL is ready to use, so you can make this change as soon as you're ready, but please note that you’ll still see references to Forum in the server response up until the eventual retirement date.

What's changing?

Home page

There's a new home page experience in JSTOR Stewardship. You can find your recently accessed projects on the Home tab, and above your projects, you'll find three options to get started:

• Create a new project - This is equivalent to the Add Project button in Forum. You can create a new project or copy an existing one here.
• Manage existing projects - In addition to the View All button in your recently-accessed projects, this is another way to view the Projects page.
• Import metadata with collection builder - Formerly known as the Collection Builder (Beta) in Forum, you can create a new project starting with a metadata spreadsheet using this guided tool.

Sidebar

All of the tools you currently find in the Forum top navigation bar can be found in a new collapsible sidebar in JSTOR Stewardship. Please note that some options have new names and locations:

• The Users management area can be found under Manage Users in the Admin menu in the sidebar.
• The Admin Primary Project List can be found under Manage Permissions in the Admin menu in the sidebar.
• The Lists management area can be found under Manage Lists in the Admin menu in the sidebar.
• Collection Builder (Beta) can be found under Build Collections in the Cataloging Tools menu in the sidebar.

Viewing project records

When viewing and working with your project records in JSTOR Stewardship, there are a few key differences to note:

• The Activity Monitor can be found under the Activity Monitor tab below the project name. (The Metadata Records tab is your project records view.)
• Find more actions for selected items under the three-dot overflow menu in the actions bar such as publishing, suppressing or deleting, downloading media, exporting records, or adding selected items to a set.
• Manage your saved sets and create new ones in the expandable Sets panel to the left of your project records.
• Manage your saved filters and create new ones with the Filter button in the actions bar above your project records.

Item page

When editing an individual item, your available cataloging forms, related objects (for compound objects), and transcripts (for audio and video, if applicable) will appear as tabs below the item name. Item-level actions such as Save and Publish can be found above the media viewer.

Open the drop-down menu just after the item name to find more item options such as Main record actions, searching image items in Google, and deleting or suppressing an item.

Compound objects

When working with compound objects in JSTOR Stewardship, you can find all image files associated with the record under the Related objects tab below the item name.

• To replace a file, select Add File to upload a new image and then select and Delete the image you’re replacing.
• To reorder images in an object’s sequence, select one or more thumbnails then drag and drop them into position. Or tab to an item’s Reorder item button on your keyboard. See Compound objects for full instructions.

Bulk editing

When editing multiple selected project records, there's a new bulk editing experience. In Forum, you're presented with all available fields in a cataloging form when editing two or more items. In JSTOR Stewardship, you'll select which fields you want to edit from the Bulk Edit panel first.

• After selecting your field(s) and entering your new value(s), select Replace terms to update the selected items and save your changes.
• Selecting Reset all terms clears the fields you’ve chosen in the Bulk Edit panel without updating the selected items.

Statistics and usage

The Statistics link in the Admin menu will now take you a new Statistics tab on the home page. Here you’ll find information about your content storage, audio/video, and preservation allowances. Learn more about allowances for Tier 2 of JSTOR Stewardship.

From this tab, you can also find additional statistics by project under System data and shared collections usage reporting under Collections usage data.

Learn more

Webinars

Register for "Navigating your transition from Forum to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services” (July 15, 2025 at 11am Eastern)

Join us for a 45-minute webinar, appropriate for current participants of JSTOR Forum, to learn about your institution’s transition from Forum to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services and what you need to know about the updated platform. We’ll cover recent improvements to the interface and navigation, as well as highlight a few new features.

Video tutorials

Check out our Tier 2 video playlist on YouTube, updated for JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services.