News

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many partners about the potential for highlighting smaller segments of Global Plants content, such as specimens and historical documents from a single expedition, and it was exciting how many shared our enthusiasm.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»

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»

JSTOR Selects Metafor Software

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. Read more»

User profile: Gwenaël Le Bras

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 Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (MNHN), before moving on to work on the national French portal e-ReColNat. There, he currently divides his time between H SONNERAT (botany), ARTHROTER (arthropods) and INVMAR (marine invertebrates and terrestrial mollusks). When Gwenaël told us what an impact working on Global Plants had had on his career (“Global Plants has been seeding competences in many different ways, and that's a side effect you may be proud of!” he told us), we asked him to fill us in on the details. During our interview, he revealed a commitment not only to his work but also to the continued process of learning and exploring at any given chance. Read more»

Now available: Arts & Sciences XIV

More than 30 new titles are already searchable on the platform

Dozens of institutions have already signed up for access since we announced the Arts & Sciences XIV Collection last month, and even more are in conversation with our Outreach team about starting access. JSTOR’s newest collection, Arts & Sciences XIV is devoted to the study of culture and communication. The collection supports research in Political Science, Language, Rhetoric & Communications, Archaeology & Anthropology, Asian Studies, and more. Some top titles now fully readable on JSTOR… Read more»

JPASS grows among genealogists

Among the new users now adopting JSTOR with a JPASS plan, genealogists have established a strong foothold. Often working independently, they cite JSTOR’s range of disciplines, historical depth, and reliability as valuable for their work. Thomas MacEntee, of the website GeneaBloggers, calls JPASS “easy to use and hard to stop.”

Don’t forget: scholarly societies whose publications are part of JPASS can extend a 50% discount to members. More than 80 societies currently participate, supporting scholarly research and access.… Read more»

How can data fuel discovery?

Data has transformed and personalized experience across all aspects of daily life. But what potential does it have to transform scholarly discovery? In a recent Scholarly Kitchen article, Ithaka S+R’s Roger Schonfeld examines the abundance of scholarly usage data now in existence and the opportunities and risks of exploiting this data to benefit researchers.

Read the full article.… Read more»

Linguistics journals find outlet on JSTOR Daily

Brace yourself for a humble-brag: JSTOR Daily‘s linguistics column, Lingua Obscura, has developed a loyal following. Lingua Obscura, a regular feature in the Daily newsletters, focuses on contemporary language patterns, including internet neologisms—think “stress-eating,” “rage-quitting,” and yes, “humble-bragging.”

Articles from the column have been picked up by the news website Reddit (“Young Women’s Language Patterns“), as well as a few linguistic blogs. This recent post on hip-hop was shared by the “NYT Now” app from the New York Times.

Want more articles from Daily? Sign up for our e-newsletter.… Read more»

Do online aggregators increase citations?

An article in the March 2015 issue of the Review of Economics and Statistics says that at least for economics scholarship between 1995 and 2005, the answer is yes. Authors Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder attribute JSTOR’s importance in increasing citations to the cross-section of journals it offers, its comprehensive backfile coverage, and its relatively early genesis as an online journal aggregator.… Read more»

Promote JSTOR to your users

Resources to help you get the word out about JSTOR at your library

Want to share your excitement for JSTOR with patrons and let them know what’s available? Help is on its way! JSTOR has developed a set of resources online that support librarians in promoting licensed content on JSTOR to students, faculty, and other patrons at their libraries.

Right now, our toolkits help librarians with newly licensed content. Resources include video tutorials, posters, graphics and ads for library websites,… Read more»