[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

[Pat LaFollette]

Is anyone thinking about how enormous the bibliographic database 
being discussed here would be?  For the Molluscan literature alone, 
there are an estimated 300,000 titles.  I'm sure similar estimates 
have been made for other groups.  For systematic biology as a whole, 
there must be several million titles.  Such a bibliography, if it 
were done well, would be exceptionally useful. But, wow, what an 
extraordinary undertaking.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library currently holds only a tiny 
fraction of these titles.  Unless they can find a way around the 
copyright issue, BHL will never have more than a small percentage of 
the whole.  This is not a criticism of BHL.  It provides an 
exceptionally valuable service by making the old, the rare, and 
obscure literature readily accessible. I use the resource 
heavily.  But I am dubious how much value article level indexing 
would add to the resource.  The bibliography would be fragmentary and 
probably not particularly useful in itself.  It isn't necessary for 
finding most papers. The traditional journal - volume - pages and 
plates citation route works just as well as it always has in paper 
libraries. Some works in BHL, bound collections of reprints, for 
example, do require special handling to make their content 
accessible, but that's another topic.  If there were a chunk of time 
and money to be invested, I think it would be much better spent 
improving the quality of BHL's taxonomic indexing.

Pat

At 03:44 PM 10/8/2009, you wrote:

>I would normally tend to agree with you on your general point, except for
>the fact that the millions of existing communities that (attempt to) manage

[snip]


Patrick I LaFollette
Research Associate in Malacology
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
pat at lafollette.com