[Taxacom] How to trace publications based on collections in specific herbaria and/or museums?

[Ib Friis]

Dear Taxacom-readers,

It is getting more and more necessary for taxonomists to demonstrate
that they are useful and used. This does not only apply to the
individual scientists, but also to institutions with taxonomic
collections, such as museums and herbaria. 

In an attempt to live up to that increasing demand for documentation,
the leadership of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has issued an
order to its curatorial staff - The staff members are requested to
document which publications from 2011, written entirely by external
scientists, that in one way or another are based on material in the
collections of the Museum. It is added that "this may be difficult, but
very important for the documentation of the use of the collections. Try
to get all the scientists that borrow material to inform you about their
publications and supplement this information with your own search within
reasonable limits."

To find publications that are based on collections in the Natural
History Museum of Denmark is indeed a difficult task. As curator of the
herbarium of vascular plants at the Museum, I know that my particular
section of the Museum has 950 outstanding loans to scientists all over
the world, including institutions in the developing countries. The loans
of herbarium specimens are normally made to institutions, not directly
to individual scientists, so even if I wrote to all 950 and asked them
if they have published anything on our collections in 2011, I am not
sure that the message would reach all. 

A more practicable solution might be to use digital search for
electronic publications that quote the herbarium acronym. However, for
the herbaria of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, which is situated
in Copenhagen, this acronym is "C". We have normally been rather proud
to be an old institution that has a single character as its acronym, but
in this case it is rather unfortunate, like it must be for other well
known herbaria with acronyms like "A", "B", "E", "F", "G", "H", "J",
"K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "U", "V", "Y" and "Z". 

In publications, material from our herbarium at "C" is normally referred
to in text strings of one of the following forms: "(C)", "(C, ", ", C,"
or " C)". But a search in for example Google Scholar or other search
engines  result in overflow of thousands and thousands of hits, even
when these text strings are combined with other relevant words such as
"botany", "plants", etc. - It can be added that this is a specific
problem for the botanists - the curators of the zoological and
geological collections are lucky that their collections have acronyms
with a characteristic sting of four letters.

Has any of the Taxacom-readers good ideas about how it might be possible
to specifically document answers to the (unfortunately relevant)
question about the use of the botanical collections of the Copenhagen
Natural History Museum - and of other herbaria with similarly
insignificant acronyms?

Hoping for a good idea and with best wishes, 

Ib Friis
Professor, dr. scient., curator of vascular plants
Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen
ibf at snm.ku.dk