[Taxacom] Finding articles

[John Grehan]

What I find most interesting about the 'modern' state of bibliographic
information is that it is still as hard to obtain copies of some early
publications as it was 30 years ago. For example, I recently came across
one essential publication for which only two copies exist in two
libraries in Switzerland. There are no electronic versions and non
immediate inter-library access. I will be asking the interloan personnel
at my library to see if they can make a direct contact with the
potential sources to find out whether they would be willing to arrange
someone make a copy that I can pay for directly. There are a few other
articles for which there are similar challenges so it makes things slow
going at times.

John Grehan

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 3:51 AM
To: taxacom
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue
ofLife

On 14 Dec 2011, at 22:56, Stephen Thorpe wrote:

> 
> integration of published biodiversity data, with names linked to the
literature using BHL, etc., then Wikispecies is a great place to do
this, though, for some reason, Rod page seems to think that his BioStor,
and also Mendeley are better places.

To clarify, these projects have different goals.

Mendeley is assembling a massive online bibliography. We lack a freely
available list online of every taxonomic publication, Mendeley seems a
good place to assemble this.

BioStor http://biostor.org/ is a tool to extract articles from BHL
(which has essentially no notion of an article). To date some 65,000
articles have been extracted, a large fraction of which are post 1923
(BHL contains a surprisingly large amount of modern literature). Finding
articles in BHL using BioStor relies on having good bibliographic data
for articles, hence my interest in Mendeley.

In terms of linking literature to names, Wikispecies is a nice project,
although I have reservations about the details. IMHO Wikispecies falls
uncomfortably between a classification and a nomenclator, it lacks the
kind of automation needed to be able to rapidly populate it from
scratch, and it lacks proper templates to support data harvesting of
citations. But all of these could be addressed.

I confess I can't get too excited about classifications, multiple or
otherwise. It makes as much sense arguing about classifications as
arguing about arranging books in a library (or specimens in a museum).
It's a tool for navigating information. If you want to argue about
something "real", then argue about phylogeny (which is more complex, but
at least it is connected to data).

Regards

Rod


---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id12517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of
these methods:

(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

(2) a Google search specified as:
site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here