IUBio

Polychaete Bibliography on CD-ROM

Linda Ward MNHIV003 at sivm.si.edu
Fri Feb 2 14:10:16 EST 1996


I want to take this opportunity to answer all of the questions I have
been receiving concerning the Polychaete Bibliography on CD-ROM.
  1.) We have plenty of copies of the CD, the cost is $15.00 and that
includes postage.
  2.) Payment MUST be in cash or a check made out to the "Smithsonian
Institution " in US dollars.
  3.) We can not accept credit card payments, our department is not able
to handle them. I know that it would be easier for those of you outside
the US but I'mafraid that it just isn't possible.
  4.) If you send a request for the CD via e-mail I will file the
request away until the money has arrived to pay for it. Otherwise we run
into bookkeeping proble ms at this end.
  5.) I have not tried it on a MAC myself so I can't be sure but as far
as I know the CD doesn't work on MAC's, it is strictly for PC's. It can
be run in Window s 3.1 and I see no reason for it not to work in Windows
95 since the software is all on the CD and is not actually installed
onto your computer.
  6.) Updates, etc. The CD was originally created as a test for the
Smithsonian Press to see if they wanted to get into this type of
publication. The bibliography was not proofed prior to moving the data
to the CD software and it was not c ulled for duplicate or
non-polychaete entries. The software (Romware) was also poorly
documented and awkward to use. The CD had approximately 10,000 entries a
nd our current personal-use bibliography has in the neighborhood of
16,000 citations. I would like to re-issue the bibliography but it
requires a lot of clean-up which I have begun but things like our 2
government shutdowns, the blizzard a nd general staffing cutbacks has
slowed my progress tremendously. There is also a question about what
format to issue it in. Robin Wilson spent a lot of time moving our
bibliography into a bibliographic software package called Papyrus. I
have been using this program to enter new records and I have also spent
a lot of time trying to standardize spelling of things like author names
and journals. Robin also appended to this bibliography records that he
had downloaded from Zoo. Rec. and Biol. Abstracts. I have talked with
the people that oversee these 2 on-line databases and found that if I
include these downloaded records in a bibliography that I issue I will
have to pay them a licensing fee of $3.00/citation. Even after the
duplicates are deleted I suspect that there would be several thousand
citations for which I would have to pay this licensing fee and that is
just not feasible. I am aiming to have a relatively clean version of the
bibliography ready to re-issue by this fall (assuming we don't have
anymore shutdowns or blizzards, or large "Literature Cited" sections to
review for Kristian and Greg). I would like to see it go on the World
Wide Web in some format as I think it will be the easiest, most cost
effective, way to do it and keep it up dated. For those who don't have
Web access but are on the Internet it could also go on the Smithsonian
Gopher server I think. I would also like to see it go out as a Papyrus
bibliography either compressed on disks or on a CD but as far as I know
there is not a MAC version of Papyrus at this time. It does work in DOS,
Windows 3+ and Windows 95. Once a decision has been made I will let the
group know.

NHB MRC 163
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 20560
E MAil: MNHIV003 at SIVM.SI.EDU
TEL:(202)357-4843, FAX (202)357-3043



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