One thing I find myself doing (probably more often than I should) is adding a reference to my Zotero library for an item in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL doesn't have article-level metadata (see But where are the articles?), so when I discover a page of interest (e.g., one that contains the original description of a taxon) I store metadata for the article containing that page in my Zotero library.

Hot on the heels of Geoffrey Nunberg's essay about the train wreck that is Google books metadata (see my earlier post) comes Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems by Péter Jacsó. It's a fairly scathing look at some of the problems with the quality of Google Scholar's metadata.Now, Google Scholar isn't perfect, but it's come to play a key role in a variety of bibliographic tools, such as Mendeley, and Papers.

I've been playing recently with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), and am starting to get a sense for the complexities (and limitations) of the metadata BHL stores about publications.

Just a quick not to make a link between David Shorthouse's post about taxonomic consensus and distributed version control (Taxonomic Consensus as Software Creation), and Galen Charlton's article in The Code4Lib Journal (Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata). Some interesting food for thought here. Both mention Git.

This started out as a comment on Peter Murray-Rust’s response to my post and grew to the point where it seemed to warrant its own post.

More on the discussion of structured vs unstructured experiment descriptions. Frank has put up a description of the Minimal Information about a Neuroscience Investigation standard at Nature Precedings which comes out of the CARMEN project. Neil Saunder’s has also made some comments on the resistance amongst the lab monkeys to think about structure. Lots of good points here. I wanted to pick out a couple in particular; From Neil;

Frank Gibson of peanutbutter has left a long comment on my post about data models for lab notebooks which I wanted to respond to in detail. We have also had some email exchanges. This is essentially an incarnation of the heavyweight vs lightweight debate when it comes to tools and systems for description of experiments.

‘No data model survives contact with reality’ – Me, Cosener’s House Workshop 29 February 2008 This flippant comment was in response to (I think) Paolo Missier asking me ‘what the data model is’ for our experiments.

Time for a rant. I spend a lot of time fussing with records from sources such as GenBank and DiGIR providers, trying to extract strings that might be identifiers, with a view to linking sequences to specimens (and thus to localities), sequences to publications, publications to GUIDs, etc.

This morning I got to sit down with Bill Flanagan, Barry Canton, Austin Che, and Jason Kelly and throw some ideas around about electronic notebooks. This is an approximate summary of some of the points that came out of this. This may be a bit of brain dump so I might re-edit later. Neither Wikis nor Blogs provide all the functionality required.