Sponsor profile: Shelley James & BISH
Shelley James is a Curator and Expedition Leader at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum’s Herbarium Pacificum (BISH) in Honolulu, Hawaii. She met with us to talk about her work and tell us why she chose to sponsor access to Global Plants for the National Herbarium at the Papua New Guinea Forest Institute (LAE). The two institutions have a long history of collaboration, and the Museum's expeditions to Papua New Guinea date back to its founding in 1889. Read more»
May 12, 2015 – Mountain View, CA and New York, NY – Metafor Software, a leading provider of real-time anomaly detection technology, and JSTOR today announced that JSTOR has adopted Metafor Software as a core component of its technology operations. JSTOR, a digital library that contains upwards of 50 million pages of content and serves millions of users annually, has implemented Metafor to speed awareness of problems in application performance and site usage and to enhance its monitoring of key metrics. 
Gwenaël Le Bras was a database coordinator at the National Herbarium in Paris, acting as a liaison between the GPI team and the IT department of 
Part of the shared mission of JSTOR and the Global Plants Initiative is to promote awareness and education in plant sciences, environmental science, and the history of science. For those who are just getting started in their study of plants, the volume of material in Global Plants can be intimidating. It is with this in mind that we created 
Kevin Thiele is a systematist and taxonomist with a particular interest in Australian Proteaceae, Rhamnaceae, Viola and Hibbertia (Dilleniaceae). He is currently working on new Western Australian species and other taxonomic matters in Hibbertia, but notes that as a herbarium curator, there is rarely enough time in the day to complete all that has to get done and manage to do much “real work.” So, he does taxonomic work in between other tasks. For Kevin, this time is almost meditative: “By around 3:30 in the afternoon, to stop myself banging my head on the door or going completely barking mad, I disappear into a quiet corner of the vaults and work on taxonomy for a bit – it’s a wonderful salve for sanity.” 
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