Greetings all,

 

In the case of Level 2, we still have a good deal of work to do to decide on the recommendation for a standard for content and metadata.

 

To try to start some conversation about this, we'd like to offer some ideas on what we have heard from others about why this standard is important.  First, let's think about a couple of uses for this standard.

 

In Christchurch at the TDWG meeting in 2004, Rich Pyle suggested the need for a central repository for references of taxonomic works so that taxonomists (and others) could simply pick the references that they needed from a list and they would get a bibliographic or literature cited citation in a form that they need for submission of a publication, building a CV, etc.  I believe he was hoping for an open access version of EndNote or the like, that would support us all so we don't each have to build such lists.   Gregor has just made much the same point.  To have this functionality, we would need several things, but first, we would need the standard.

 

In the formation of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://bhl.si.edu/), which Neil mentioned earlier today, the group working on it, largely from the libraries, are, apparently for the first time, attempting to catalogue biodiversity literature (larger than taxonomic, but including taxonomic) at the level of article, chapter, or volume of a book series, and not only at the higher level as libraries have traditionally done.  At the same time, they are working on what the metadata will need to be to added, etc.  Those working on the BHL have expressed an interest in joining our work on the level 2 standard, so it will serve all of our needs.  They are currently working on getting funding for a Union Catalog of these publications.

 

It seems to us, that this is the ideal opportunity for librarians and taxonomists to finally settle on a common way of indexing, cataloguing, describing, and finding taxonomic literature (and beyond).  If the BHL can fund and build such a system that contains all of the information needed for their catalogue, we hope that it can be built upon in such ways that taxonomists will be able to use it as Rich described, as well as to generate level 1 strings and hold metadata related to language, and to contain and generate LSIDs in such a way as to link all of these.  

 

There will, of course, then be a relation to level 3, which will also need to link the level 2 database(s) and be able to used the scanned material that the BHL is generating to create the larger database(s) using the level 3 standard to make all literature interoperable and to make it further interoperable with other biodiversity data (names, concepts, specimens, barcodes, etc).

 

Cheers,

Anna & Chris