Blog Topic: Open collections

Discover the story behind Reveal Digital, an open-access primary source collection on JSTOR highlighting underrepresented 20th-century voices of dissent. Learn how library crowdfunding, collaboration, and preservation have built a resource of over 70,000 items.

Accessible knowledge opens the door to education. In 2025, explore JSTOR’s open access collections, featuring art, photographs, and cultural archives that empower visual literacy and interdisciplinary discovery.

The history of ornithology (the scientific study of birds) has involved observations captured in imagery going as far back as prehistoric stone-age drawings.[1] As ornithology developed as a natural science it faced the aesthetic challenge of convincingly capturing depictions of different bird species,[2] leading to beautifully documented and historically fascinating works of illustration. Several shared […]

Books of hours are devotional texts that contain a personalized selection of prayers, hymns, psalms, and New Testament excerpts chosen specifically for their owner. Popular in the Middle Ages, the most expensive of these books could be highly decorated, but the more affordable versions usually only showed minimal decoration, usually of the first letter of […]