[Taxacom] Periodical and book list

[Robert K. Peet]

Hi Roger,

What we really need is a set of GUIDs for individual references, not just 
journals/books.  At present we have a set of DOI's used by Crossref, 
endnote-based standards imbedded in EML and VegBank, a simple stub in TCS 
(for lack of a standard) and ABCD, and any number of standards if you look 
around.  The only way to be able to communciate efficiently is with some 
GUID system for individual references.  My take on the GUID meeting last 
February at NESCent is that we as a community have pretty much converged 
on LSIDs, and you seemed to agree. Why don't we just establish an 
LSID-based reference repository and let folks start contributing their 
critical references? I would be happy to submit a few thousand, were you 
to set it up   :-) .

Cheers,
Bob

  ======================================================================
      Robert K. Peet, Professor & Chair         Phone:  919-962-6942
      Curriculum in Ecology, CB#3275            Fax:    919-962-6930
      University of North Carolina              Cell:   919-368-4971
      Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3275  USA          Email:  peet at unc.edu
                    http://www.unc.edu/depts/ecology/
                  http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/
  ======================================================================


On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, 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 -  are hopelessly out of date.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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>

  ====================================================================
  Robert K. Peet, Professor              Phone:  919-962-6942
  Department of Biology, CB#3280         Fax:    919-962-6930
  University of North Carolina           Cell:   919-368-4971
  Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3280  USA       Email:  peet at unc.edu
              http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/
  ====================================================================