Just a few days ago, nearly the full back run of issues from The Kenyon Review was made available via JSTOR. (If JSTOR is new to you, you can find out about the organization and the archives they maintain here.) To get some sense of what this means, that’s nearly 220 issues worth of material, starting with the inaugural issue of KR in 1939. We packed up copies of each a year and an half ago and sent them to New York. Page by page, each issue was scanned, proofed for accuracy, and digitally stored. We had been talking about digitally archiving KR for some time, a conversation that began long before I started wearing the managing editor hat around here. But there were even more exciting possibilities beyond simple storage once a digital archive existed.
For a journal with nearly 70 years worth of material (its true! And we’re celebrating in a major way with our Winter ’09 issue–stay tuned), it is clear that managing the content that appears in the magazine only begins as an editorial concern. When the back run goes as deep as KR’s, our content needs to be considered from a curatorial perspective, too. How do we keep all of it in the bigger literary conversation? The pieces were chosen to appear in KR for their cultural and literary necessity–as David Lynn often says, their timelessness–but how do we insure the work remain physically viable to a readership that is interested in enjoying it? Furthermore, how do we make it as easy as possible for that readership to access the material?
For a fleeting moment, we thought about reincarnating the Wave Books Poetry Bus, loaded up with the KR archvies, taking it around the country and letting people put their hands and eyes on the back issues. Then I read an article that said the bus expected to burn through 1500 gallons of gas. So we parked the idea of KR landyacht.
JSTOR was the next best option, and here’s the coolest part: Using the JSTOR search tool (circled on the screen grab below)
…you can word-search the entire KR archives. Want to find out how many Flannery O’Connor stories KR has published? (5, including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” though her name appears countless times throughout the history of the journal.) Poems of John Ashbery? (4, nearly forty-five years apart.) How many pieces have the word “petunia”? (2) How many have the word “hotdog”? (1). You can see how fun this could be–but also how important a research tool. Need to find something specific? Be specific. Want something general? Be general.
Access to JSTOR is currently available through participating libraries and institutions. Check your local public or institutional library–you may be in luck (You can find a list of participating institutions here). If not, don’t fret. We’re working with JSTOR to provide access to KR content via connection from the KR website. This will be an affordable way to access KR material from any internet connection, by password, regardless of where you are logging-in from. More on that in the coming weeks.
But for now, those with JSTOR access–enjoy!