Taxacom: old journals

[Roderic Page]

I can?t speak for BHL, although I do collaborate with the project (e.g., https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbiostor.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C01d9559d7d03413a745b08dad1616f5a%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638052513665841324%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=yu4U4dNk7UIV4EjTexg3t5KlfthEtdmq1eWHBc49gt0%3D&reserved=0 )

Yes, the original cut off was influenced by US copyright, which moves forward a year at a time. In an ideal world this would automatically trigger additional scanning across the BHL member libraries, but that requires that those libraries have the resources to do this.

Note that there is BHL content that is much more recent, in some cases only a few months old. However, this depends on copyright holders being (a) willing to make their content available, and (b) BHL having the resources to scan and/or process that content.

My sense is that BHL?s resources are increasingly limited, and the amount of new content being added to BHL (particularly, content related to taxonomy) has been diminishing recently. There are a few happy exceptions: a lot of recent Australian journals are being added, and most Mus?um National d'Histoire Naturelle journals are in BHL.

There is a lot of taxonomic literature that has been digitised but which is not in BHL. I?ve been trying to keep track of some of this, e.g. https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Ftaxonomyarchive%3F%26sort%3D-addeddate%26page%3D1&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C01d9559d7d03413a745b08dad1616f5a%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638052513665841324%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2FV0XvEl4VQAgl%2BsIszlMPNT8c4xVPf6rDp6wrAT7uKE%3D&reserved=0 which barely scratches the surface.

Ultimately, as with most things, it comes down to resources (AKA funding).

Rod
On 28 Nov 2022 at 16:37 +0000, David Redei via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu>, wrote:
As Biodiversity Heritage Library was just mentioned, I take the
opportunity to pick up a related topic I have wanted to ask since ages.

It is apparent that on BHL the vast majority of periodicals are available
up to about the early 1920's only. I always suspected (but I might be in
error, if so please correct me) that this is because the platform started
not much before 2010, and due to copyright reasons they only uploaded the
volumes up to 90 years before the (that-time) present. But I always
expected that as time passes, further volumes and issues will be gradually
uploaded. Now we are well after 2020, so volumes up to the early 1930's
would legally be possible to be made available, still it apparently does
not happen, all titles which over a decade ago were uploaded up to the
early 1920's are still frozen at the very same year, without any subsequent
addition.

Does anyone know what the policy of this project is? Will there be any
addition later, or ten years ago they just uploaded the volumes up to 1920
and only those will be available forever, the project has been finished?

With best regards, David Redei