[Tdwg-guid] DOIs and persistence -- when DOIs go bad

[Sally Hinchcliffe]

Rod
> 
> 1. What about library catalogues. Surely a lot of literature will have  
> an electronic card catalogue somewhere? What about WorldCat -  
> http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/. Is it not possible to search global  
> library cataologues to extract basic metadata about a lot of  
> literature, or am I being - as usual - hopelessly naive?
> 
It's true, there are electronic sources of some of this information, 
and it's possible that we are capturing in IPNI some information 
which is then _also_ captured (from the same journal) in the Kew 
Record and then _also_ captured (at least for books) by the library 
catalogue
So a central place where some of the metadata - especially horrible 
hairy things like DOIs and ISBNs - could be captured once and re-used 
might be helpful ESPECIALLY if the source was from the publisher 
itself (that's what Amazon makes you do, after all) - someone with an 
incentive to get it right and correct it if it's wrong. Actually just 
doing it once at Kew would be an improvement (but we'd need to 
actually write the tools to do that). Of course, there will be no 
substitute for the editors actually scanning (ie. with their eyes) 
the literature themselves to check that everything is present and 
correct - descriptions, types and so on. And the KR team are looking 
for different things as well - everyone has additional information 
they need from a publication that they will want to extract. 

The more I think about it the more I can see that we do need a really 
good robust system for identifying and cross linking all these 
things. DOIs will do part of it, but I guess BHL will have to cover 
the rest  ... As to whether we end up with something centralised or 
standardised, I haven't really thought about it enough to say ...

Sally
*** Sally Hinchcliffe
*** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
*** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708
*** S.Hinchcliffe at rbgkew.org.uk