[Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Jim Croft" <jim.croft at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 11:59 PM

> When
> someone calls [f]or the protologue, we do not want to send them the whole
> article.  With limited resources we can not afford to scan an[d] store the
> whole article when all we want is one page of it...

***
Yes, an important issue: if all you want is the protologue, you do not want
to have to deal with a whole article. However, a complicating factor is that
from a nomenclatural perspective it is not necessarily immediately apparent
what the protologue is; in fact it needs to be be 'circumscribed' from case
to case. In the modern literature this will (almost always) be
straightforward, but the introduction, etc to a book or article may also
contain material that belongs to the protologue. Say, the Acknowlegdements
may comment: "we are deeply grateful for the hospitality of Mr Przilowsky;
in acknowledgement we have named our third species in honour of his eldest
daughter". Theoretically, there may be a separation of hundreds of pages
between one part of the protologue and another.

["Protologue ...: everything associated with a name at its valid
publication, i.e. description or diagnosis, illustrations, references,
synonymy, geographical data, citation of specimens, discussion, and
comments."]

It is not required that all the requirements of valid publication are met in
a single publication; the final 'validating' publication only needs to refer
to all the required parts, which need to have been effectively published
earlier. For example the final publication may be a few lines only, but
refer to a page-filling illustration elsewhere. So a protologue can be
spread over more than one publication. All in all, 'circumscribing' a
protologue is not a trivial matter. However, if the result goes into an
accessible database, it need be done only once.

Paul