A different view on prioritized titles

Doug Holland, Director of MBG Library, threw out an interesting challenge - reevaluate our prioritized list to include the number of volumes for a title, and rank the titles by a ratio of number of names to number of volumes. We wanted to do this at the beginning of the project, but there was no way of knowing how many volumes we had for a given title (or any easy way to pull it from Millenium, our library software). Since we've exported data out of Millenium and into Access, that's now a simple task.

View list

One caveat - the number of volumes for a title is for the entire run as cataloged in our library. So, there are more volumes of say, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, in the catalog than we plan to scan because we're going to stop at 1923. Unfortunately there's no definitive way to pull out just the volumes dated earlier than 1923.

One of the more interesting aspects of looking at our prioritized literature in this way is that if we started in on this list, our number of digitized titles will grow quickly since many of these are single volume works. Right now we're plateau'ing on titles because we're just adding in more volumes for the titles we've already begun. In practice we plan to pull from both lists (this one and our previous prioritized list).

Integrating taxonomic intelligence from uBio

David Remsen and his team of developers working on uBio have created some amazing web services for taxonomic intelligence. We've integrated LinkIT with the OCR'd text from Botanicus. See it in action at:

http://www.botanicus.org/text.asp?pageid=93935

Click the "View scientific names on this page" link to call LinkIT and discover the names within the text.