Some quick comments:

This survey suggests the potential for a project that, in my opinion, is far too big and unwieldy. I suggest focussing on a core set of functions, and leave the rest to projects that do this sort of thing much better. I think the two most important things this project could do are:

1. provide an OpenURL service that will resolve a bibliographic citation (or a GUID)

2. provide GUIDs (e.g., SICIs and BICIs) that cost nothing for articles, books, and book chapters, and provide a resolver for these GUIDs.

3. provide a service to parse bibliographic citations (along the lines of Paratools).

If you have 1, then you have a web service that people can use. For example, Connotea users can specify an OpenURL resolver to try and find an article online. By default it is CrossRef's service, which relies on DOIs. Imaging having a service that also supports literature that uses other GUIDs (such as Handles and SICIs).

If you have 2, then everything in this project has a URI and therefore exists on the web (or, at least it's metadata does). This is one of the motivations behind the bioGUID project.

If you have 3, then you have a service that would be useful in automatically integrating bibliographies from a range of sources (e.g., parsing lists of the literature on the web, or in bibliographies of papers).

In terms of a portal, etc., in an age of Connotea this seems wasted effort -- they do this sort of thing well, why duplicate effort? Community tagging, etc., relies of communities, and Connotea already has one.

The other lesson to learn from Connotea is that relies on existing web services, such as CrossRef's OpenURL resolver (to extract metadata associated with a DOI), and NCBI's PubMed service. By using these services, the developers could concentrate on other things. What I an arguing is that if you develop services, the "portal" (or whatever) becomes either (a) easy, or (b) largely irrelevant because you can use existing tools.

Regards

Rod

On 3 May 2007, at 17:08, Charles Hussey wrote:

The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is a Network of Excellence project, funded by the EU for 5 years (http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/). One of the deliverables of the project will be a Bibliographic Resource to be known as the European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature (E-ViTL).

This part of the project is being managed by the Natural History Museum, London and we are in the process of defining detailed specifications for such a service. We are keen (naturally!) to ensure that the service will meet actual user needs and so, if this is an area dear to your heart, you are warmly invited to participate in an online survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?A=193016818E830 (the survey will close at midnight on 11th May)

This will ensure that your views are taken into account.

NOTE: E-ViTL is likely to be a resource discovery tool rather than a repository of full text articles. It could, however, point users to repositories, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://bhl.si.edu/), online journals and other sources.

There is some debate over whether E-ViTL should attempt to provide reference management functions, in addition to providing access to literature. Also whether it should be a repository for reference lists, rather than a portal to search distributed repositories. However, the purpose of this survey is to gather user requirements and, although it is unlikely that E-ViTL will be able to incorporate all possible requirements, your views will provide a useful pointer for future development.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Hussey,

Science Data Co-ordinator, Data and Digital Systems Team, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD United Kingdom

Tel. +44 (0)207 942 5213 Fax. +44 (0)207 942 5559 e-mail c.hussey@nhm.ac.uk Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/ Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/

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