About this book
Names are our primary framework for organizing information on the living world. But how do we tie scientific names to a foundation so they provide stability and repeatability to otherwise fluid conceptual topics such as taxonomies? Biodiversity informatics aims to solve this issue, and its founding father was Charles Davies Sherborn. His magnum opus z provided the bibliographic foundation for current zoological nomenclature. In the 43 years he spent working on this extraordinary resource, he anchored our understanding of animal diversity through the published scientific record. No work has equaled it and it is still in current, and critical, use.
Anchoring Biodiversity Information celebrates Sherborn, his contributions, context and the future for the discipline of biodiversity informatics. The papers in this volume fall into three general areas. Papers in the first section present facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describe the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. Papers in the second section discuss current tools and innovations for bringing legacy biodiversity information into the modern age. The final section tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including digital access, innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy.
Contents
1 Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond
Ellinor Michel
Sherborn – person, scientist, bibliographer and context
13 Charles Davies Sherborn and the “Indexer’s Club”
Neal L. Evenhuis
33 A magpie with a card-index mind – Charles Davies Sherborn 1861–1942
Karolyn Shindler
57 Naming and Necessity: Sherborn’s Context in the 19th Century
Gordon McOuat
71 Sherborn’s foraminiferal studies and their influence on the collections at the Natural History Museum, London
C. Giles Miller
83 ‘Where is the damned collection?’ Charles Davies Sherborn’s listing of named natural science collections and its successors
Michael A. Taylor
107 Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn’s and Richmond’s historical legacy of bibliographic exploration
Edward C. Dickinson
135 Sherborn’s influence on Systema Dipterorum
F. Christian Thompson, Thomas Pape
Current tools and innovations for bringing legacy information into the modern age
153 Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits
Suzanne C. Pilsk, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Joel M. Richard
173 Sherborn’s Index Animalium: New names, systematic errors and availability of names in the light of modern nomenclature
Francisco Welter-Schultes, Angela Görlich, Alexandra Lutze
189 Digitising legacy zoological taxonomic literature: Processes, products and using the output
Christopher H. C. Lyal
207 The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics
David Remsen
225 The List of Available Names (LAN): A new generation for stable taxonomic names in zoology?
Miguel A. Alonso-Zarazaga, Daphne Gail Fautin, Ellinor Michel
The future of biological nomenclature
233 A common registration–to–publication automated pipeline for nomenclatural acts for higher plants (International Plant Names Index, IPNI), fungi (Index Fungorum, MycoBank) and animals (ZooBank)
Lyubomir Penev, Alan Paton, Nicky Nicolson, Paul Kirk, Richard Pyle, Robert Whitton, Teodor Georgiev, Christine Barker, Christopher Hopkins, Ellinor Michel, Vincent Robert, Jordan Biserkov, Pavel Stoev
247 Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy
Roderic D. M. Page
261 Towards a Global Names Architecture: The future of indexing scientific names
Richard L. Pyle
Appendix
283 Manual for proposing a Part of the List of Available Names (LAN) in Zoology
Miguel A. Alonso-Zarazaga, Philippe Bouchet, Richard L. Pyle, Nikita Kluge, Daphne Fautin
299 Index
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