[Taxacom] Periodical and book list

[Roderic Page]

Dear Roger,

http://www.bioscience.org/atlases/jourabbr/a.htm (etc) is another  
useful list with ISSN's.

Regards

Rod

On 17 Jan 2007, at 12:41, Roger Hyam wrote:

> I am interested in conducting a social experiment.
>
> It would be very useful when combining taxonomic data from multiple
> databases if there were  globally unique identifiers for major
> taxonomic publications (periodicals/serials and books). One could
> then supplement a reference citation like
>
> Edinb.J. Bot. 47(2): 89-200 (1990)
>
> with an LSID and/or a URL that will tell the user that
>
> Edinb. J. Bot. is the Edinburgh Journal of Botany published by HMSO
> in Edinburgh. It may also give other alias' it is known by and a note
> might say that it is a continuation of Notes from the Royal Botanic
> Garden Edinburgh.
>
> It would enable the user to merge the data with people who have used
> other abbreviations for the same publication title - possibly without
> human interaction.
>
> Lookup services could be created that went from abbreviation to full
> journal title.
>
> The trouble is that the major lists of publications (e.g. BPH, TL2
> etc) are either:
>
> -  are not available electronically.
> -  are available on a subscription basis.
> -  are hopelessly out of date.
> -  can not be added to instantly (if the one you want to use isn't
> cited).
> -  are not freely distributable (i.e. you can't download the whole
> lot and use them as a lookup table in your database or re-distribute
> them as part of a product or archive them to keep you data safe)
>
> I am thinking that this is an ideal test case to see if the
> 'community' could build a freely distributable list that helps us
> all. The list would:
>
> - only include 'top level' publications i.e. periodicals, books,
> multi volume works. It is assumed that it is relatively easy to
> unambiguously identify a location within such publications via
> volume, part, and page/plate numbers.
> - contain a simple set of fields for each publication.
> - would be entirely freely distributable. i.e. a complete copy could
> be downloaded under a LGPL or creative commons type license.
> - contributors would be acknowledged in a contributors list, but
> nothing more.
> - users could comment on entries and submit new entries in real time.
> - would be a key into/integrate with current and future digitization
> efforts.
>
> I have three questions:
>
> 1) Has it already been done?
>
> 2) If this system were available now and populated with the majority
> of publications would you use it? Would it be useful?
>
> 3) Do you (or some one you know) have a database containing details
> of titles of periodicals or books that you could export data from as
> a contribution to seed the list? If so how many records would there
> be and what subject areas (within biodiversity studies) would they
> cover?
>
> You can mail me off list if you don't want to commit to anything in
> front of everyone.
>
> This is still a thought experiment at the moment. I'll mail a high
> level summary of replies I get back to the list.
>
> All the best,
>
> Roger Hyam
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>

----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

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email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
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