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@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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