The Literature Interest Group and Charter has now been approved by the TDWG Executive.  The group’s web site is at:  http://www.tdwg.org/activities/literature/.  A brief description of the goals of the group follows below.  More information is available in the charter and on the Wiki.  Please join the mailing list using the link on that web page if you are interested.  

The group will hold a meeting on Sunday, 16 September 2007 from 2:30-5:00 pm in Bratislava.  The meeting will be held at the Faculty of Science.  Please contact me for directions, maps and details if you plan to attend.

Summary

Due to the international calls for greater availability of biodiversity data, an increasing number of institutions, especially the Biodiversity Heritage Library project (BHL) are digitising taxonomic literature and making these materials freely available on the World Wide Web. Most of the digitally available literature is in the form of image files and to a lesser extent, text files generated, sometimes very imperfectly, using optical character recognition (OCR). These are the two forms planned by the BHL. In a few cases text or metadata are searchable, but those are idiosyncratically formatted, marked up or split into fields.

An increasing number of institutions, publishers and funding bodies are however showing interest in making full text of portions of the taxonomic literature available. Having standards in place will facilitate their work and encourage them to make the literature data interoperable with other pertinent data.

Becoming Involved

The Literature group welcomes participation from all interested parties with biological, library, and publishing backgrounds. Members of the group are interested in standards and technologies for analysing biodiversity data from taxonomic literature and combining them with knowledge from other biodiversity data sets.

Participants in other TDWG groups that work on data included in taxonomic literature are strongly encouraged to participate. This participation is vital to ensure the standards are compatible and interoperable.

The TDWG process requires that new Task Groups be launched through an Interest Group. The Literature group can facilitate establishment of new Task Groups that relate to taxonomic literature standards.

Please contact the Convener or Core members to discuss potential projects or join existing Task Groups.

Anna L. Weitzman, PhD

Botanical and Biodiversity Informatics Research

National Museum of Natural History

Smithsonian Institution

office: 202.633.0846

mobile: 202.415.4684

weitzman@si.edu