Re: paleonet Ellis and Messina bibliography pages

I appreciate the difficulties - our Department  has much the same 
problem with all types of archive records (many hand written). OCR 
software is improving but probably still to costly to make it 
worthwhile.

The benefits of the online catalogue far outweigh the lack of full 
bibliographic citations (species searching for one!) and it wasn't 
meant as a criticism. Which brings me to the point of this post. I 
believe that we could remedy this problem through the 
Micropalaeontological community. If a number of foram. workers signed 
up for "citation duty" then we could gradually input citation details 
into a database (Endnote for instance). We then would be well on our 
way to an international Foram. reference database. Not such an 
onerous task if the load was spread.

Andy




>Andy - that information is in the bibliography pages at the front of 
>each Catalogue volume. These pages have not been available on the 
>internet, as you point out. Taken together they represent a pretty 
>fair resource - we estimate between 12,000 and 15,000 citations. 
>Volume 30 of the original Catalogue, for example, which was intended 
>to be the stopping point (we're working on v. 105 at present!), 
>contains 270 pages of citations to the works processed for vols. 
>1-29.  Including everything d'Orbigny published.
>
>It would be relatively easy to scan all the bibliography pages but a 
>back-breaker to OCR them and proof them, so that they could be 
>searchable, downloadable data -- at least with current OCR 
>technology. As an alternative back-breaker, we could manually 
>prepare a simple senior-author-and-date index to the entries on the 
>scanned pages, so that one could at least find the page to look at. 
>I can post the scans as PDF files and anyone is free to download a 
>stack and start in.
>