Tom Pasley recently drew my attention to CrossRef's addition of a XML format parameter to their OpenURL resolver.

CrossRef have released a tool for bloggers to look up DOIs and insert them into blog posts:So far the tool is only available for WordPress blogs.

In a series of emails Chris Freeland, David Shorthouse, and I have been discussing DOIs in the context of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). I thought it worthwhile to capture some thoughts here.In an email Chris wrote:I think the perception that there are two "camps" is unfortunate.

Following on from my earlier grumble about how the catalogue of Life handles literature, I've spent an afternoon mapping publications in the "itis".publications table in a copy of ITIS to external GUIDs, such as DOIs, Handles, and SICIs in JSTOR. The mapping is not complete by any means, but gives an idea of how many publications have GUIDs.You can view the mapping here. Many of the publications in ITIS are books, which don't have DOIs.

Playing with the recently released "Catalogue of Life" CD, and pondering Charles Hussey's recent post to TAXACOM about the "European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature (E-ViTL)" (part of EDIT) has got me thinking more and more about how primitive our handling of taxonomic literature is, and how it cripples the utility of taxonomic databases such as the Catalogue of Life.