[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

[Paul Kirk]

Just a few quick points ...

A central resource for serial publications could, once and for all, date
when a publication was published (not the date on the cover!).

Copyright issues [in our information domain] will soon disappear ...
trust me ... ;-)

Taxonomic indexing could be improved if/when BHL take advantage of the
page level references in nomenclators, monographs, checklists, etc ...
not a criticism of BHL - I was using it 15 minutes ago!

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Pat LaFollette
Sent: 09 October 2009 09:47
To: Richard Pyle
Cc: 'TAXACOM'
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

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 


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