And those origins go back to Sherborn’s magnum
opus Index Animalium – a catalogue of every living or extinct animal
described between 1758 and 1850, along with the book or publication it was
first named in. A massive achievement by any standard, Index Animalium
covers about 9200 pages which appeared in eleven volumes between 1902 and 1933.
Sherborn spent 43 years of his life working on it – and even today, many
zoological disciplines continue relying on it as an important source for
references.
 |
| ICZN secretary Ellinor Michel |
Currently, the major part of the works
indexed by Sherborn are easily accessible at BHL or are currently being
digitised by partner institutions of the BHL or BHL-Europe consortium. This
means researchers can easily verify the original sources directly, and see
whether the information in Sherborn’s Index is still up to date.
The Index itself was digitised by
Smithsonian Institution Libraries in 2004, and can be consulted online. Currently, SIL is working on new
indexing facilities that will link the Index directly to Sherborn’s cited
literature sources, which were given in cryptic abbreviations and acronyms.
Accordingly, BHL could provide links from the digitised literature sources to
the taxonomic names extracted from the early works by Sherborn’s Index and
similar projects. This would definitely be useful for researchers who need to
find the original descriptions of animal species and genera, making it a useful
supplementary service to the “Taxon Finder”-tool.
In the wrap-up
discussion of the Symposium, Richard Pyle focused on the idea of a Global Names Architecture
that interconnects all existing biodiversity related data initiatives, ranging
from gathering specimens in the field to reviewing the published legacy and
publication of new taxa.
 |
| The concept of a Global Names Architecture |
Author: Francisco Welter-Schultes
No comments:
Post a Comment