Anchoring Biodiversity Information: from Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond

Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’

Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond. This meeting is being organised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and the Society for the History of Natural History, and is partly a celebration of his major work Index Animalium and partly a chance to look at the future of zoological nomenclature.

Details are available from the ICZN web site. I'll be giving a a talk entitled "Towards an open taxonomy" (no, I don't know what I mean by that either). But it should be a chance to rant about the failure of taxonomy to embrace the Interwebs.

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London Calling Video

Here's the video of my talk at the NHM (courtesy of Vince Smith).


Going Digital - by Rod Page from Vince Smith on Vimeo.

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London Calling

Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below. Karen James pointed out the irony that a talk where I gave the NHM a hard time for being backward about embracing digitisation can't be viewed on most PCs at the NHM because SlideShare requires a recent version of Flash (which users can't install without IT's permission), and the downloaded presentation won't open because the NHM uses an older version of MS Office. So much for my attempts to share the slides. There will also be a video available at some point.

Going Digital

View more presentations from rdmpage.

The second presentation was at the British Libraries "Talk Science" series, for some background see the forum on Nature Network. There will be a podcast available of this presentation. In her introduction to my talk, Sarah Kemmitt quoted from a recent paper by Antonio G. Valdecasas ([JACC]1175-5326:1820@41 where he described Vagabundia sci:

Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word 'vagabundo' that means 'wanderer'. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science Citation Index (SCI) as a measure of ‘good’ science has been damaging to basic taxonomic work. Despite statements to the contrary that SCI is not adequate to evaluate taxonomic production (Krell 2000), it is used routinely to evaluate taxonomists and prioritize research grant proposals. As with everything in life, SCI had a beginning and will have an end. Before it becomes history, I dedicate this species to this sociological tool that has done more harm than good to taxonomic work and the basic study of biodiversity. Young biologists avoid the 'taxonomic trap' or becoming taxonomic specialists (Agnarsson & Kuntner 2007) due to the low citation rate of strictly discovery-oriented and interpretative taxonomic publications. Lack of recognition of the value of these publications, makes it difficult for authors to obtain grants or stable professional positions.

My own feeling is that SCI probably does a reasonable job of ranking the impact of taxonomic publication, the real task is to broaden our notion of what gets cited.

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Talks at The Natural History Museum and British Library

Vince Smith has produced a nice flyer for my forthcoming talk at The Natural History Museum on March 17th (11-12).



It will be a busy day as I'm also talking at the British Library in the evening (6pm - 8:30pm), for which Sarah Kemmitt has produced a flyer, and set up a discussion forum on Nature Network. With all this effort going into the artwork, I'd better actually come up with something useful to say.

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