Dear Charles, Cc EDIT WP6

As you can see, there are a lot of issues here and I am sure different communities will have different goals and expectations for 5.3. As I see it 5.3 is about providing access to literature rather than managing information about literature, though the two are closely linked. The overwhelming message I hear from WP6 is that people want to quickly access articles (i.e. individual publications) and not just journals. I have head some people want page level access (specifically the WP5 team in Berlin have talked about this) though I think this will be very difficult to achieve. Also article level access assumes we have the articles somewhere online, and for most communities this is not the case, at least not yet, and certainly not with any rights management (at least not of the kind the NHM would need). In the absence of providing access to articles, you want to tell people where they can physically go to get a physical copy of an article. But since libraries don't generally store article level information, it is hard to see how even this can be done.

All I can really talk about are my needs, which are very close to those of Dave Roberts. However, our communities are reasonably sophisticated when it comes to bibliographies - most are not. Personally we have all the louse bibliographic references online (about 9,000) and am serving OAI metadata about them. We've also scanned most of the taxonomic works (at least about 3,000 so far) which are accessible online. Shortly we will be moving the PDF's to a DSpace server based in Switzerland that is issuing GUID's (specifically handles) for them all (this is in conjunction with the ant literature that is also online). At the moment we just references articles via their web URL. Like Dave I would like to be able to discover articles we haven't scanned and link to them from my online bibliography (there are ways to do this automatically). In effect I'd like to create e virtual library of articles I could access, but I would want to do this on mass for my all literature - not an article at a time. I would also like tools that helped clean up my bibliography (de-duplicate it and spot errors plus normalize its contents more efficiently). Again it is possible to do this but I suspect this is beyond what 5.3 is capable of - at least in a way that scales. I've blogged about how this can be done and just submitted a grant application that would facilitate this.

I would be keen to hear from the other WP6 groups about what they would like, but remember literature management tools are something the rest of WP5 is doing. WP5.3 is about accessing literature, and in this respect I see then as a kind of gate keeper.

Vince

May I say thank you to Dave, Vince and Irina for their helpful comments. All this brainstorming has resulted in an online questionnaire which everyone in the EDIT Community is invited to participate - so tell your friends and colleagues! I shall also extend the invitation via the TAXACOM and TDWG listservers.

The survey can be found at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?A=193016818E830

I shall run the survey until Friday 11th May and shall then start writing the requirements report.

Of course, in addition to the questionnaire, further debate on this forum would be most welcome!

NOTE: E-ViTL is likely to be a resource discovery tool rather than a repository of full text articles. It could, however, point users to repositories, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://bhl.si.edu/), online journals and other sources.

There is some debate over whether E-ViTL should attempt to provide reference management functions, in addition to providing access to literature. Also, whether it should be a repository for reference lists, rather than a portal to search distributed repositories. However, the purpose of this survey is to gather user requirements and, although it is unlikely that E-ViTL will be able to incorporate all possible requirements, your views will provide a useful pointer for future development.

Thank you all for your interest.

Charles Hussey

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