[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
Roderic Page
r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Fri Oct 9 18:16:48 CDT 2009
Dear Pat,
Some of the things you mention I've been exploring with the bioGUID
OpenURL service (http://bioguid.info/openurl ). This takes journal
metadata and tries to find the article online, querying CrossRef,
JSTOR, and CiNii repositories, as well as a local database I've built
from sources such as the AMNH DSpace server and various other sources.
It currently has some 110,000 articles (most, but not all related to
systematics and taxonomy). This archive grows partly automatically
(every time it finds an article it caches the metadata, it also
harvests some journal RSS feeds, etc.), and partly through my manually
adding things, either directly or through Zotero.
So, one way forward is simply to keep populating a store like bioGUID.
There are some issues. It's usually much easier to harvest metadata
for a single journal than from a heterogenous colection. For example,
the AMNH DSpace server has metadata in a reasonably consistent format,
which makes it relatively easy to harvest, whereas sources such as the
Smithsonia Repository have all kinds of styles for recording journal
information, making it much messier to parse. Donat's ant references
will also be a bit of a mixed bag.
I agree we want to cast the net much wider than BHL, it's just that
for the moment this is the repository I'm spending sometime playing
with. In the same way, my interest in metadata for specific journals
is that it is likely to be easier to process BHL one journal at a time
(typically errors in metadata will be easier to find).
The other key issue is storing the article itself. I avoid this most
of the time as potentially it could both resource intensive (storing
gigabytes of PDFs) and there are copyright issues. But I do store some
freely available PDFs locally.
I think we are now at the point where online bibliographic tools like
Zotero are good enough to manage literature databases, and those
databases can be shared. What we don't have a good handle on is
storing the associated articles, although there are things we could
contemplate (such as buying storage on Amazon, for example).
Regarding minimal metadata, you don't want it too minimal. DSpace
repositories make this mistake, and hence their contents are as
findable as they should be. I'm continually amazed by how digital
librarians are out of step with academic citation techniques.
Regards
Rod
On 9 Oct 2009, at 22:15, Pat LaFollette wrote:
> 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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>> > 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
>
---------------------------------------------------------
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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