JSTOR
Branding an AI-assisted product for stewards of scholarly materials

For over 30 years, JSTOR has partnered with libraries to strengthen access and preservation for scholarly information. Today, over 90% of ever-growing materials backlogs lack metadata and are undiscoverable by researchers. Digital Stewardship Services was created to help solve the complexity of digital collections management so that more people can access scholarly materials and improve their lives through learning.

JSTOR began digitizing academic journals decades ago and is still using emerging technologies to make knowledge more accessible. The new AI-assisted Stewardship Services helps more people discover more scholarly materials to inform new perspectives, deepen research, and enrich learning.

300+ participating institutions worldwide

13+ million items processed, preserved, managed, and shared

81+ million users/year

Brand Architecture
Our goal was to position Stewardship Services within the org structure to benefit the audience and support our product vision and sales efforts while allowing for future brand growth.

We investigated three directions:

  • Create a new product-level brand

  • Create a new JSTOR sub-brand

  • Incorporate the product into the JSTOR brand

Option three met our goal. It highlights the seamless flow from stewardship to discovery for the 81+ million users/year on the JSTOR research platform. It leverages JSTOR’s trusted position and market saturation, while at the same time strengthening the legacy brand with its technological leadership position.

Product Name
The name Digital Stewardship Services shows domain expertise by reflecting the audience’s jargon and needs. It acknowledges collections librarians’ vital role in bringing hidden knowledge to light through their stewardship.

AI-component Naming
The name JSTOR Seeklight™ is intended to be inspirational. It connects to the goal of sharing information so that people can improve their lives through learning. It is shorthand for the products’ top tier subscription.

Messaging Framework
A source of truth document for all Stewardship messaging, positioned within the refreshed JSTOR brand. It is a living document and cross-discipline source of truth for sales conversations, product education, and marketing copywriting and content creation.

Team responsibilities:

Brand architecture

My Role: I co-led the brand architecture discovery and proposal alongside the marketing leader.

The Team: Marketing leadership collaboratuon for brand architecture recommendations, research team for qualitative surveys, organizational leadership for the final decision.

Naming

My Role: I co-led the naming strategy and the selection of the external naming agency in collaboration with the marketing leader. I provided support for research.

The Team: Marketing leadership collaboration for external naming agency recommendations, user researchers for qualitative surveys, organizational leadership for the final decision.

Messaging Framework

My Role: I led the messaging framework project planning and informational interviews with internal stakeholders and assessed insights from qualitative interviews. I managed both the copywriter and copyeditor. I presented and socialized the final framework for cross-discipline teams including marketing, education, and product teams.

The Team: Research team for qualitative surveys, internal stakeholders for insights, copywriter for final draft, copyeditor for final messaging document, product marketing specialist for review and approval.

Brand expression

See how we came to understand our stewardship audience and how those insights guided the JSTOR brand refresh and website redesign.

JSTOR brand refresh case study