[Taxacom] HHDB: hemihomonyms

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

> I have no idea of how a multinational consortium 
> works (nor do I particularly want to). 
Good choice... okay, it is not that ugly as it sounds. You just have 
to learn how it works, and then you can achieve something. In any 
case a survey is important in such a venture, this has to do with 
internal processes. BHL-Europe programmers are paid by the European 
Union. EU is much buerocracy, and everything you do must be 
justified. You get money, but you have to follow their rules. Telling 
them "sort the results by author, every monkey knows that this must 
be done so" is no option in such an environment. Always follow the 
official way. First compose a survey, then evaluate it, then tell the 
programmers the result. It is your freedom to ask the right 
questions.

>  was the user requests that were dismissed as "out of scope", such as
> finding documents by country (i.e., geographical indexing). 
This was one of the weak points of the BHL-Europe internal survey. 
Makes little sense to ask people "do you love good pizza?" before 
having checked if you are able to provide it.

> Arguably bibliographies constructed 
> by the scientific community (and I include lists of literature cited 
> in articles) far exceed what libraries can offer (especially as 
> libraries don't deal with articles).

That is one of the points BHL programmers need to know. 
Providing tools for connecting information derived from other 
metadata providers is important, creating a portal with opportunities 
of interactions. Attaching true publication dates for digitized 
works, if these dates were published somewhere. Things like these.

Francisco


University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org