The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which contains more than 100,000 entries and fills fifty-one volumes, includes some distortions so flamboyant as to be beyond belief. These are an old story. But such distortions have importance [...]

Almost everyone has heard about what happened to Beria in the Encyclopedia. After his liquidation, subscribers were notified, with full instructions, that they should snip out the article about him and insert in its place substitute articles which were duly enclosed, about the Bering Strait and an obscure eighteenth-century statesman named Berholtz. These were the best available substitutes beginning with ‘Ber’. During Stalin’s day when the party line changed on some matter so important that the Encyclopedia itself had to be changed, subscribers were obliged to turn in the volume affected to the party secretary; it was pulped and a new whole volume, cut and patched, was then sent out to the subscriber. Nowadays the reader is allowed to keep the book, and trusted to make the proper emendation himself. Progress!

Another person ‘expelled’ from the Encyclopedia was a Chinese Communist leader, Kao Kang. To replace him, a substitute page went out dealing with a city in Tibet. [...] In their haste to make the revision, the editors overlooked the fact that the same Tibetan city also appeared elsewhere in the Encyclopaedia, spelled differently.

– John Gunther, Inside Russia Today (Penguin, 1964).

…yeah. “Gifts for Her, Gifts for Him”. It is apparently now a useful commercial approach to gender cameras. (Interestingly, this is the only part of the “Electronics” section which has his-and-hers gift recommendations – I wonder why…)

Note that one camera, the Olympus XZ-1, is even on both lists. For women, it comes in white at £289.99, and for men it comes in black at £311.08. I don’t even want to know the logic behind that one.

Tedious, repetitive, tasks. Surely, this is something a computer can do for me? Lo and behold, imagemagick saves the day…

convert -crop 1024x768+1632+1040 *.JPG -set filename:f 'crop_%t.%e' +adjoin '%[filename:f]'

..takes a series of 4288×2848 pictures, crops out the centre 1024×768, and drops this into a seperate file called crop_FILENAME. Skimming through these is far quicker…

I know, I know, trivial solutions. But it saves me a lot of time. And as a result:

…pictures of the woodpecker outside my living-room window, shot with a D90 and an old manually focused f/5.5 300m lens.

It works! I had almost two hundred frames to run through to find these (which may explain why they waited a month and a half for me to get around to it…)

November 11th.—There had been so much talk of an armistice that a Brigade message in the morning telling us of its having been signed at 8 o’clock, and that hostilities were to cease at 11, fell somewhat flat. The event was anticlimax relieved by some spasmodic cheering when the news got about, by a general atmosphere of ‘slacking off for the day’, and by the notes of a lively band in the late afternoon. The men betook themselves to their own devices. There was a voluntary Service of Thanksgiving in the cinema which the Germans had built; the spacious building was quite full. [...] ‘To me the most remarkable feature of that day and night was the uncanny silence that prevailed. No rumbling of guns, no staccato of machine-guns, nor did the roar of exploding dumps break into the night as it had so often done. The War was over.

November 12th.—Baths were a first concern.

— The War The Infantry Knew, 1914-1919, ed. Capt. J.C. Dunn.

So, let us dig a little. Who are JSTOR? How does their money flow work? Their site tells us:

JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
©2000-2011 ITHAKA. All Rights Reserved. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA.

Okay, so, we have a name. Their About pages don’t give much more information; no details on who exactly this “non-profit organization” is. No annual report, of course, god forbid. They do give a contact address, in New York – on Fifth Avenue, in fact, very fancy – and so the obvious guess is that they’re a New York corporation.

And, lo and behold, they are. “Ithaka Harbors, Inc.”. They changed their name when the two amalgamated in 2009. The older iteration of Ithaka can be found as a Delaware corporation operating in New York. Confusingly, JSTOR remained in existence, absorbed Ithaka, and changed its name.

A little more digging turns up the current Form 990 for the merged organization (and some older ones for JSTOR alone) here. It does indeed seem to have 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, though they’re not very helpful about letting us find the paperwork.

Well, we have it now. JSTOR/Ithaka turned over sixty million dollars in 2009, and employed 211 people. The 2007 & 08 reports both give around $45m in turnover; let’s look at 2008, to strip out the effect of the amalgamation so that we’re only looking at the “JSTOR division”.

To briefly explain the charging, first, when an organisation joins JSTOR it pays an upfront capital sum (the ACF) and then an annual subscription (AAF); the general idea is that the ACF pays for the cost of building the archive and the AAF pays for the actual day-to-day service. Poking around the various fees pages suggests the ACF varies wildly by institution and by which content you’re taking, but an average of double the annual fee seems plausible.

The income breakdown, from a total of $43.5m – $8.6m in Archive Capital Fees, $30.3m in Annual Access Fees, $1.8m in Service Revenue. “Service revenue” is unclear. Buried down in section 11, meanwhile, is the intriguing “miscellaneous revenue”; $133k in publishers fees, $35k in remote session fees, $145k in pay-per-view. Other revenue was then covered by a loss of a third of a million, which is later explained as a currency loss – presumably the vagaries of foreign exchange in a volatile year.

The next section lists expenses of “FEES AND PUBLISHERS PAYMENTS”, $8,358,557, of which $8,242,126 is attributable to program costs rather than management overhead. Journal scanning amounts for about three million – though this is low, it was eleven million in 27 and five in 2009 – with another five million on administrative costs & travel, three million on IT, eleven and a half million on salaries and staff costs. A million went to “old” Ithaka in grants, a million was written off as depreciation, a million on “occupancy” (rent?), and then some small bits of change like conference costs. Overall, an eight-million dollar surplus, but the next year was a deficit; the fluctuations of scanning charges probably come into play here.

The payroll covers 113 staff, of whom 12 seem to be listed as officers, directors, etc. The senior staff average a salary of ~$155k, with the ED paid $300k, while the other staff average about $67k.

So, some interesting points.

• The figure of $145k for individual articles is definitely interesting – only 0.35% of JSTOR’s revenue came from pay-per-view cases? This is vastly lower than I expected; quite possibly the prices are so high (and JSTOR access so common, academically) that very few people are willing to pay and unable to circumvent it via a friend. The estimate quoted is $19/article as an average – so perhaps only seven and a half thousand articles over the year?

• Scanning averages about six million dollars a year in 2007-9. The Archive Capital Fee averages about eight and a half. There’s a bit of a mismatch here, but it could be they compare more closely over a longer timeframe, or that this is building a surplus for future work. They’re reasonably close, at least.
• Comparing the ACF to the AAF, estimating one to be twice the other for any given institution, we can get a proxy for what proportion of income is new – it looks like ~15% in 2008/9. There’s a corresponding growth in overall income (it’s masked by a sharp drop in investment income, which is only $2.5m in 2008, a third of what it was in 2007) which would seem to bear out this figure.

So, overall…

The once-off capital fees charged by JSTOR look reasonable for the ongoing costs of actually digitising the documents. After that, about 30% of the annual fee is payments to the publishers, with the other 70% going on overhead. Of that overhead, 10% is directly running the servers, almost 40% staffing, and the remaining 20% various administrative costs; I am no expert in the field, but the salaries paid do seem quite high (and Manhattan offices aren’t cheap, either).

So if your library pays a $10,000 ongoing subscription, that’s effectively $3,000 direct to the publishers, $1,000 on servers, and $6,000 on people to feed and water those servers (or manage those people, etc.). It would be very interesting to know how those publisher payments break down – but, equally, it would be interesting to know how much of that 60% is actually essential for running the service.

The first photo feels like I should edit in some 5mm-tall people fleeing the monster.

Photography was suspended briefly for a car to drive over it. (Literally: the wheels passed several feet to each side) The driver couldn’t see what was in the road, but guessed we were photographing something small and fragile, and looked at us with a very guilty expression as she passed…

In 1547 Janet Bruce’s priest told her to go on to the High Street of Edinburgh, donate a wax candle to a chaplain, seek out Isobel Carrington, and say to her, in front of witnesses and in good Scots: ‘I grant here before three honest persons that I have fairly and wrangfully injurit and defamit you, sayand and allegand you are ane common bluidy whore. I knaw nothing but ye are ane honest woman and keeps guid pert to your husband.’
Janet was to say also to Isobel’s husband, Robert: ‘I failit far to you and your wife calling you ane cuckold, whilk I confess is nocht of verity for your wife is ane honest woman.’
For the sake of satisfaction on every side, Isobel was then to go to Janet and say: ‘Ye are ane honest woman, I never knew that ever ye swiffit with the auld official, and insofar as I rehearsed the samen I ask God forgiveance and you.’

—Edinburgh: a history of the city, Michael Fry, 2009

Give or take the ‘swiffit’, not much change there in four hundred and sixty years.

These photographs were all taken in natural light with the bellows extended to around 350mm; I haven’t yet calculated the effective magnification, but from counting threads, my best estimate is that the field of view is on the order of 8mm across. The main problem was successful focusing – even at f/8 or f/11, the depth of field is still very low, and it’s possible to watch the area in focus travel up and down a surface as you move the lens.

These are all “horizontal” shots, with the item held up vertically in front of the lens – the bellows is set up for a tripod mounting, but it’s a very light tripod and the camera doesn’t lock on the mount firmly, so there’s a good bit of vibration in the system. Next time with mirror lock…

The rear of a cork-based tablemat.

Cotton weave on a (very worn) teatowel.

The tip of a pair of nail-scissors.

I particularly like the one picking its way through the daisies, though the exposure is a bit off.