[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

Fri Oct 9 16:15:00 CDT 2009

Dear All,

Donat has 32,000 ant references.  I  have 3,400 Pyramidellid snail 
references.  I'm sure many others have similar bibliographies in a 
variety of formats.  Some  simple (or not so simple) filters could 
combine them.  but who would such a patchwork bibliography actually 
benefit?  Probably not me.  For a global bibliography to be useful to 
more than the lucky few, it must really be global.  Maybe start with 
Zoological Record, add Sherborn, Ruhoff, 1980 for mollusks, and grow 
from there.  "Crowdsourcing" is  an interesting idea, but the crowd 
needs a place to start, and is the systematic biology crowd really 
big enough for it to work?

Donat asks a good question about Internet Archive.  I think mapping 
the bibliography to the digital literature must look beyond BHL.  IA 
of course, Gaulica, but elsewhere as well.  The National Library of 
New Zealand already has the Proceedings of the Royal Society of New 
Zealand available at the article level 
(http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/).  NOAA has the Bulletin of the U.S, 
Fish Commission 
(http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/Fish_Commission_Bulletins/data_rescue_fish_commission_bulletins.html). 
University of Kansas has their publications on line 
(http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/).  There is a diverse and 
rapidly growing body of such projects that should be included.

Everybody these days makes and distributes PDF reprints of their 
papers.  I am working toward making them for every paper in my 
bibliography, whether the digital images come from BHL, IA, et al, or 
me going to the library with my scanner.  Every mollusk meeting I 
attend has a jumble sale of old reprints.  A mechanism for a 
centralized digital reprint repository, with minimum metadata 
(Author, date, title, subject keywords), could be a very useful 
intermediate step on the way to more extensive digital article level indexing.

Pat

At 09:16 AM 10/9/2009, Donat Agosti wrote:
>Rod
>We do have all the bibliography of ant taxonomy, and if you want 80% of the
>entire ant literature (ca 32,000 rerferences, not all of it are clean
>though). But we do not know, how many of them have already been scanned by
>BHL. Would that nevertheless help?
>
>Do you also mean scanned if the Internet Archive has scanned it and has it
>on their server?
>
>Donat
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page
>Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 1:26 PM
>To: Pat LaFollette
>Cc: TAXACOM
>Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
>
>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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> >
> > The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either
> > of these methods:
> >
> > (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
> >
> > Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/
> > pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
> >
>
>---------------------------------------------------------
>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
>Tel: +44 141 330 4778
>Fax: +44 141 330 2792
>AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
>Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
>Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
>Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
>Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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>
>The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these
>methods:
>
>(1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
>Or (2) a Google search specified as:
>site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here

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