Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is expanding its long-time partnership with JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services by joining the Tier 3 charter program.
EMU’s collaboration with JSTOR Stewardship has already helped bring both its collections and its perspective into wider view. Throughout 2024, EMU was one of the early beta partners who shaped the development of JSTOR Seeklight—the AI-assisted collections processing tool within JSTOR Stewardship—by testing early versions on their own collections and giving candid feedback on how its outputs held up against the realities of day-to-day archival work. Through their previous participation in Tier 1, EMU already shares over 5,000 items openly on JSTOR, including photographs, journals, scrapbooks, and yearbooks that document life on campus and in the Ypsilanti community.
As a Tier 3 participant, EMU will use JSTOR Seeklight alongside the integrated tools within the JSTOR Stewardship platform, including digital asset management, preservation via Portico, and the JSTOR platform as the front-end for discovery and access. As a member of the charter community, EMU will continue the involvement that began during their beta partnership, joining a cohort of institutions helping shape responsible, scalable approaches to digital collections work through ongoing feedback, testing, and shared practice.
EMU’s early plans for Seeklight include working through a backlog of digitized-but-undescribed materials—including theses, dissertations, and handwritten documents—generating draft metadata and transcripts that archivists and student workers will review before publication.
“For us, digitizing is the quick part. It’s the description that takes time—and that keeps materials from becoming discoverable,” said Alexis Braun Marks, University Archivist at EMU. “The beta program gave us a way to work with JSTOR and our peers on a better approach. Joining the charter program lets us carry that collaboration forward and begin putting JSTOR Seeklight to work on our backlog, while keeping our team at the center of the judgment that strong description and transcription require.”
“EMU helped shape JSTOR Seeklight from the very beginning, and their move into the charter program is a natural next chapter in that relationship,” said Bruce Heterick, Senior Vice President of Open Collections and Infrastructure at ITHAKA. “Alexis and her team have long contributed critical community insights, and we’re excited to keep learning alongside them as they use these tools to bring more of their distinctive collections into wider use.”
About Eastern Michigan University
Founded in 1849, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is the second oldest public university in Michigan. It currently serves more than 13,000 students pursuing undergraduate, graduate, specialist, doctoral and certificate degrees in the arts, sciences and professions across 300 majors, minors and concentrations.
About JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services
JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services is a seamless, cloud-hosted platform that unites digital asset management, long-term preservation, and expanded discovery pathways—including sharing on JSTOR—with the AI-assisted collections processing tools of JSTOR Seeklight.