Continuing with my exploration of the Biodiversity Heritage Library one obstacle to linking BHL content with nomenclature databases is the lack of a consistent way to refer to the same bibliographic item (e.g., book or journal). For example, the Amphibia Species of the World (ASW) page for Gastrotheca aureomaculata gives the first reference for this name as: Gastrotheca aureomaculata Cochran and Goin, 1970, Bull. U.S. Natl.

MarkMail is a great tool for searching mail archives. Although focussing on software development projects, they are open to requests, so last week I asked if they could index TAXACOM. My pitch was that TAXACOM is a long running list full of interesting conversations, has been the subject of scholarly study (Christine Hine's book I mentioned earlier), and is topical given interest in biodiversity and the Encyclopedia of Life.