[Taxacom] Systematists as Holists

[William L. Graham]

I have been lurking for months in the TAXACOM listserv reading the
fascinating discussions and debates surrounding integration of legacy
knowledge and naming/labeling with groups identified by modern genomic
analyses.

As a trained taxonomist from the 70's who became somewhat disillusioned with
the classic systematics (I was a graduate student of Dr. Rogers McVaugh at
Michigan for over 6 years) and also ran out of steam during the thesis
preparation finales, and who started a well-paying career as a professional
computer programmer, I have several questions.  I hope not to waste the time
of you, who are luckily practicing experts.

I "went back to school" recently and have just attained an MS in Library and
Information Science at UIUC (top rated school in LIS) in the hope of melding
librarianship, computer expertise, and systematic botany.

(1) Your discussions are of ideals.  There are no opportunities for the
needed cadre of experts.  How to be useful and still put clothes on one's
back and pay the bills?

(2) Dr Robert Mesibov's list amazes me at its applicability to 1974
systematics.  We yearned to be able to compare specimens at the nucleic acid
level

(3) Arthur Chapman's work (and I am probably leaving out many others) on
curation seems spot on from my "old" perspective

(4) Integration across levels of data gatherers and manipulators is a hugely
non-trivial task.  Dr. Bryan P. Heidorn's work with NESTER is archetypical.
The field worker, data curator, analyst, and so on all need to be able to
interrelate data, reuse them, and archive them with confidence.  This is
wholly aside from the many challenges facing how to extend the type concept
to identifiable genotypical groups.

I would humbly ask for your thoughts on these matters.  It seems that we old
types with new skills ought to have some utility in this utterly beneficial
field.  I think there must be many like me who have multidisciplinary ideas
and skills, or is consilience only a topic for conversation?

In other words, how can I help?

-- 
William L. Graham, Digital Initiatives
University Library, Chicago State University
9501 South King Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60628-1598
WilliamLyleGraham at gmail.com
http://webs.csu.edu/~wgraham/

Loriene Roy, President of the American Library Association, issued the
following statement on the controversy:

We applaud Dr. Klag's swift action to restore full access to the POPLINE
database. We are dismayed, however, at the circumstances that caused the
administrators running the POPLINE database to begin blocking any and all
searches on the word "abortion."Any federal policy or rule that requires or
encourages information providers to block access to scientific information
because of partisan or religious bias is censorship. Such policies promote
ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students, and
individuals on both sides of the issue access to accurate scientific
information.