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

Roderic Page r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Fri May 26 12:52:34 CEST 2006



On 26 May 2006, at 11:30, Sally Hinchcliffe wrote:

> Ah Rod
>
> Some day I must take you to the IPNI editors' room to see the piles
> of books and journals from the library that they work with. You may
> remember books ...

Books, they're made of -- what ya call it -- "paper", right? I've  
written one, and edited another, so I'm vaguely familiar with the  
concept ;-)

>
> In my dream world all editors of botanical journals and publishers of
> botanical books will supply ipni with a TCS document appended to the
> end of a PDF with all of the new names, new taxa and new
> combinations, plus of course the relevant DOIs, and they will simply
> need to check that the physical representation does exist (no
> electronic publishing allowed in botany) and then approve all of the
> records to be uploaded. And then get on with back standardisation of
> the rest.
>
> Then I wake up ...

OK,

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?

2. For the future, doing what you suggest (names + DOIs) would be  
trivial, especially if taxonomy gets it's act together and sets up a  
journal that accepts appropriately marked up documents in the first  
place. As soon as we realise that what we need is a database that  
thinks it's a journal, we will make progress. Any notion of capturing  
data after the fact in the 21st century is ludicrous (which is why I've  
no expectation that Zoobank will succeed).


Rod

>
>
> Thanks for the links - will pass them on to our standardisation
> programmer
>
> Sally*** Sally Hinchcliffe
> *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
> *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708
> *** S.Hinchcliffe at rbgkew.org.uk
>
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

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Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
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