[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

[Roderic Page]

Dear Pat,

I'm not sure this a case of "either or".

For a lot of BHL content the metadata is dirty enough to make  
automating finding an article a non-trivial task. I want to make that  
easier so that, given say a standard bibliographic reference, or a  
nomenclator-style article,volume,page within article reference I can  
instantly go to the relevant place in BHL. Being able to do this would  
make it easy for nomenclators to add value to their database (making  
use of their manually created indexing of the literature), and would  
also enable publishers to link bibliographies in papers to BHL content.

I'm really just after bibliographies for things that BHL have scanned.  
For recently published literature with DOIs (or literature archived in  
repositories such as JSTOR) we have tools to find the literature. I'd  
like to have the same tools for BHL.

Regards

Rod



On 9 Oct 2009, at 09:46, Pat LaFollette wrote:

> 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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---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
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