Dear Annelid enthusiasts,
Like Robin Wilson, I too would like to express my thanks to Linda and
Kristian for providing such an extensive bibliography to the annelid
community. This resource will make all of our lives much easier.
I would like to write a few lines and inform readers of my experience
with the bibiography thus far.
First, I have Papyrus up an running on my PC. I was able to
successfully restore Linda's .bb files both on my home PC and in my
office. At home it was necessary to let the restoration run overnight
on the 50 Mhz 486 I have there, in the office, it took about 2 hrs on a
100 Mhz Pentium. In order to achieve Linda's 20 minutes, I guess one
would need a 166 to 200 Mhz Pentium or perhaps a Pentium Pro. In any
case, the restoration was successful and I think the reference count
was something like 17,481.
I immediately began to run the bibiography through some exercises and
was very excited about the results. First I searched for my own
bibliographic citations and those of some colleagues. I was actually
surprised that my own citations contained some obscure things like
Pacific Marine Stations Research Reports! Since my former lab ceased
to exist in 1979, those reports are quite rare. I have two full sets,
so if anyone wants them, let me know and I shall make some copies.
These primarily deal with the ecology of Tomales Bay.
I next did some searches on specific families, particularly Oweniidae
and Scalibregmatidae, the chapters on which I am presently working for
the Santa Maria Basin Taxonomic Atlas. I did notice some references
missed by me previously and that has helped the effort.
I also did searches from the Comments files and there is where searches
for genera and species will be successful, although as Linda has
mentioned, those are not complete.
Another very useful feature is to run a listing of the Journals. If
you have ever wanted to look up the entire spelling of some obscure
journal...well, we now have a list. Imagine how this will make your
compilation of Literature Cited sections easier for those journals
requiring full citations. All you need is to print the list and put it
in a notebook for future reference.
In general, it appears that the bibiography is complete through 1993,
but that some things are missing from 1994 onward, although there are
many 1996 references included.
I strongly recommend that potential users purchase a copy of Papyrus.
It only costs $99 and is very powerful. This has to be the best
bargain in bibliographic databases available. The searches are fast.
Results can be printed to screen, printer, or disk. On disk, the file
will be converted to whatever Wordprocessor you select. I use
WordPerfect and the formatting appeared flawless whether into 5.1 or
Windows 6.1.
The only problem you might experience is with on-board memory. Papyrus
is a DOS based program, and although you can open it in Windows it
apparently needs about 500 KB of on-board RAM to load. It utilizes
expanded memory for operations, but needs the on-board RAM to load. At
least that is what my version 7.011 seems to require. So, if you have
been using Windows recently, you might do a MEM check in DOS to see if
you have at least 500KB or RAM, if not, you might want to check your
memory allocations.
The fully installed version of Linda and Kristian's files take up about
15MB of disk space. For my part, I plan to tailor things to some
personal requirements.
I might suggest that any future updates include input files of new
citations rather than full restoration versions.
Oh, Linda, among my citations is a reference to a chapter by Grassle,
Maciolek and Blake in a book by George Woodwell, "The Earth in
Transition." The date is listed as (?), it is actually 1990.
So, on behalf of Brigitte, Nancy, and others here in Massachusetts, I
say thank you for such an exhaustive and useful resource!!!!!!!!!!
Bye,
Jim Blake
ENSR, 89 Water Street
Woods Hole, MA 02543
(jablake at ix.netcom.com)
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