News

New content: Botanische Staatssammlung München artwork

We are delighted to let you know we have added two new unique collections to Global Plants:

Botanische Staatssammlung München Artwork – Water Colours of Fungi by Fritz Wohlfarth

This collection consists of watercolors of fungi painted by Fritz Wohlfarth (1906–2005). Dr. Fritz Wohlfarth studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany) and obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry. For many years he worked as a field sales representative for a varnish company in Munich. During his tours around Germany and… Read more»

New publishers added to Books at JSTOR–and more news

Books at JSTOR has seen tremendous growth over the course of 2015. One hundred leading scholarly publishers now participate in the program, contributing 38,000 titles—including 2,250 published in 2015. Library participation has increased to more than 700 institutions in 40 countries. Read on for additional highlights from this year.

New publishers: JSTOR has partnered with 100 distinguished presses. We are pleased to welcome the publishers that joined in November/December:

Anthem Press
Aspen Institute
Gerlach Press
Intellect… Read more»

New tools for interdisciplinary researchers

December 8, 2015—New York, NY and Seattle, WA—The JSTOR Labs team recently partnered with Dr. Jevin West’s team at the University of Washington DataLab to test and develop tools to help researchers introduce themselves to key topics and publications from other fields. The results of their work have been incorporated into JSTOR Sustainability—a new site, currently in beta, that contains a broad range of scholarly articles and research reports dealing with environmental stresses and their impact on… Read more»

Annotating all knowledge, JSTOR joins coalition of innovators

JSTOR is part of a newly formed coalition of organizations working to annotate the web. This group of 40+ knowledge platforms, libraries, and publishers is being led by fellow not-for-profit Hypothes.is.

Read more about this effort in Nature and on hypothes.is, which features a series of video interviews that give insight into the community of collaborators and where JSTOR’s own Alex Humphreys discusses the importance of learning by doing as we try to make web annotation a powerful new… Read more»

JSTOR announces fees for 2016

Teach about Plant Blindness

A world without plants? Would you like to learn more about Plant Blindness and teaching about it in the classroom?  JSTOR has some resources for you to help you get started. Read more»

Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition

Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition is a beta site built by JSTOR Labs in collaboration with JSTOR’s Content Development team based on David Livingstone’s African expedition along the Zambezi and Shire Rivers from 1858-1864. The site provides students, teachers, and scholars with a greater understanding of the scientific, historical, and cultural contexts of the expedition, offering users both a high-level overview of the expedition and the ability to perform a detailed analysis of the materials.

The resource brings together content from JSTOR… Read more»

Partner interview: María Mercedes Arbo

We interviewed long-time Global Plants partner and respected taxonomist María Mercedes Arbo, who told us about the evolution of botanical research from the 1970s to today and mused about the direction botany might be headed. Among other topics, Dr. Arbo discussed the role of technology and best practices for effective research. As a respected botanist in your field with a long career, you must marvel at what can now be done through projects like Global Plants. How have you seen this have the greatest impact on the work of botanists? I began working in Plant Taxonomy around 1972, in Corrientes, where Botanical Research had started in 1965. The Herbarium was just beginning, and the Library was very small. The main Argentine Botanical Libraries were located at Buenos Aires, 1000 km away. In those years not even photocopies were common. I still keep the photocopy of Urban’s monography on Turneraceae (1883), which I got in Buenos Aires (Darwinian Institute), made on a special photosensible paper. You could request material on loan to each Herbarium, but it wasn't easy, depended on surface or airmail, you had to write a letter, wait sometimes several months to receive an answer, and loans, logically, were partial. In those years, almost the only way to study a good number of the nomenclatural types was to travel to Europe to visit the herbaria of various countries, with different currency and legal standards... Read more»

Global Plants at Botany 2015

We were proud to exhibit for the fifth year in a row at the Botanical Society of America’s annual conference in Edmonton, Canada. The conference provides an excellent venue for us to meet with users, participants, and partners, and discuss their needs and our future plans. It is also a great opportunity to see many of our North American partners in person and to meet faculty and students who are using Global Plants. (A group of graduate students from… Read more»

In the lab: Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition

JSTOR Global Plants has gotten very big--at last count some 2,222,000 plant type specimens and 245,000 primary sources were contained within it. That enormity has helped it to become an indispensable resource for plant taxonomists and botanists but can be overwhelming to non-specialists. At the GPI conference last September, our team spoke with many partners about the potential for highlighting smaller segments of Global Plants content, such as specimens and historical documents from a single expedition, and it was exciting how many shared our enthusiasm. Read more»