Authors (occasional update 1)

FROM: ALAN POOLE, EDITOR - BNA ONLINE (afp7@cornell.edu)
TO: BNA AUTHORS, EDITORS, REVIEWERS
4 April 05

Welcome BNA authors! These pages will provide occasional updates on the status and evolution of the Birds of North America project. As many of you know, BNA lives!

BNA print was completed in DEC 2002; 716 species accounts, 743 species, 18 volumes, 18,000 pages. BNA Inc., the partnership that published BNA print, was subsequently dissolved and BNA’s Philadelphia offices closed. Final orders were fulfilled (2200 subscribers in all), and Buteo Books bought the limited remaining inventory, which they now have for sale.

However BNA continues – Online. Alive and well, BNA has been reborn and renamed as BNA Online, and is now based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO). CLO was a major partner in the development of BNA print, and acquired the rights to BNA in late 2002, with an eye toward online publication. CLO hired me to continue on as BNA editor, and I came on board in April 2003. By August 2004, thanks to Herculean efforts by CLO’s IT team, BNA was converted to XML and launched online. If you have found this page you have no doubt seen the online BNA accounts, but we invite you to browse them in depth, especially your own. And we appreciate your feedback on what’s there. If you are an author and need a password, pleased contact me at: afp7@cornell.edu. The original author password has now expired, but many BNA authors are accessing the database through subscribing institutions.

BNA Online is a subscription-based service, with modest cost to individuals and tiered pricing for academic institutions, based on size. The advantages of BNA Online are immediately obvious: access 24/7, and by multiple users at schools, colleges and other institutions; searchability by species and topic (we are working to improve the search capabilities); the addition of rich media in the form of sound and video (much of this from CLO’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds); a gallery of digital images for each account (building slowly, but with great potential to illustrate plumages and various aspects of life history); and – perhaps most important – the ability to update accounts continually, turning BNA into a living resource.

Authors will play a central role in this updating. Already, a number of authors have provided revisions to their species accounts (see Recent Revisions at http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/BNA/) -- with a focus on accounts from early volumes of BNA, those most out of date. As you’ll see, we have revised just a handful of accounts so far, with another 10-15 planned. We are being initially conservative on this because revising documents online is time-consuming and awkward. We plan to remedy this. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSDL – National Science Digital Library;), we will create the architecture for efficient online editing, and bring together communities around species – a Science Knowledge and Education Network (SKEN). Details are available at http://sken.ornith.cornell.edu/Plone. BNA will become a model for efficient updating of online scholarly resources; we are pioneering new ground here as the scholarly venue shifts from print to digital.

We should be ready to begin serious revision of BNA Online by late 2005. Check here for updates. We’ll continue to give priority to revising early accounts, and accounts with species that have received extensive work in the last decade -- those with the most new material. In the meantime, authors can:

1) Let us know if they are interested in helping to revise BNA Online accounts, and which ones.

2) Send photos to help fill in image galleries, with a focus on life history aspects – nests, eggs and young, key behaviors, food items, details of plumage; photos should be jpegs and at least 600 pixels in width or height; please email me a few examples before proceeding too far.

3) Encourage your institutional library to subscribe to BNA Online. The advantages are obvious: access 24/7, campus-wide; potential for multiple users; searchability; video and sound; and continual updates. But librarians need to hear from you before they will commit to subscribing. You and your students and colleagues will benefit.

Thanks for past help with BNA, and for continued commitment. You have made this series possible; it was an extraordinary effort that is receiving widespread use. We are now at an exciting place and time with this series, launching a new venture that builds on the excellent material gathered so far, and on the subscriber base that has helped to finance the project. As we all know, BNA has great strengths and some weaknesses. We plan to keep the strengths, build on them, and correct the weaknesses. With your help!

Thanks!