100 @ Books @ JSTOR

With 2018 being our Centenary year, it's good to rack up a milestone with the number 100 in it. This week we're proud to announce that MHRA now has one hundred titles online as ebooks at JSTOR. The 100th is La Belle Dame qui eust mercy and Le Dialogue d'amoureux et de sa dame: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems, edited by Joan Grenier-Winther, volume 60 in our Critical Texts series.

JSTOR is a digital library run by a non-profit on behalf of academia (significantly, it's a .org, not a .com). The name stands for Joint Storage, though these days JSTOR tends to play down its nerdy origins in the computer science department at Princeton. Its very size and all-encompassing range mean that even small policy changes by JSTOR can have significant effects, but even so, it continues to develop. JSTOR and Wikipedia are currently joining up a little, like twinned cities in very different countries: JSTOR in the land of copyright, completeness and irrevocability, where the big publishers can feel safe; Wikipedia in the land of the social, the selective, and the ever-changing, where the people live.

Books@JSTOR is a relatively new development, beginning in 2012. MHRA was an early adopter, uploading digitally-produced titles from as far back as 2003's Configuring Community: Theories of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain, currently our oldest title on offer at JSTOR. Ebook platforms come and go: the early 2000s saw many short-lived ventures, even from apparently big owners. But JSTOR has thrived.

Other numberversaries for 2018 include the 400th Legenda book to be published, the 50th Critical Texts title, the 25th Austrian Studies yearbook, and so on. In truth, once any organisation has enough active projects running, one or more are bound to come up to a significant number in any given year. But that's no reason to be less pleased about it. Some of these projects are moving quickly, too: we are expecting to reach and pass 150 books at JSTOR this side of Christmas, as a first slate of Legenda titles join the Texts already in place.