Authors (occasional update 2)

FROM: ALAN POOLE, EDITOR - BNA ONLINE (afp7@cornell.edu)
TO: BNA AUTHORS, EDITORS, REVIEWERS
30 Nov 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 -- online! If you haven’t read Occasional Update #1, please start there…

Reviews/Awards – BNA Online has received several favorable reviews in the last 6 months, a testimony to your good work and to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s (CLO’s) success in making BNA accessible online:

• Library Journal (Aug 05) called BNA Online “…. A no-brainer, must-have acquisition …. Beautifully realized reference and research tour de force — and a bargain.”
  
• The Charleston Advisor (Oct 05) (a major publication serving the college and research library markets) included BNA Online in their Fifth Annual Reader’s Choice Awards for “Best New Product” – “for offering a well designed and rich website of ornithological information at reasonable prices for both individuals and institutions.”
  
• Choice (another major library publication) awarded us one of their “Outstanding Academic Titles” awards for 2006 – a list that includes only 10% of the 6,964 titles they reviewed this year.

Together these place us in the forefront of new online scholarly resources – I hope you’ll share our pride in these recognitions for outstanding publishing achievement.

Updates/Revisions – One of our major goals in keeping BNA alive and well has been to develop the capacity for efficient online editing and revision of species accounts. We’re closer to that goal now, but still four to six months away from achieving it. With funding from the National Science Foundation (National Science Digital Library) we have been hard at work in the last year developing the architecture that will facilitate updates. We’ll be creating online communities around species, places where revisers, reviewers, and editors can meet to post reviews and revisions and discuss content. Creating the pathways to make this happen efficiently requires considerable ingenuity; our developers are spending late nights here at CLO to make that happen. Stay tuned, and see http://www.sken.org/ for more details.

Authors who are eager to get started on revising their account should contact me (afp7@cornell.edu). See the BNA home page for accounts revised in the last 6 months. We are making slow but steady progress updating our earliest published accounts, those most out of date. We’ll continue to focus on this group – Vols. 1 & 2.

Subscriptions – One of the goals of BNA Online was to broaden access to this extraordinary database. I’m pleased to say we’re doing that. Over 2000 individuals have now subscribed to the online version, and over 106 college and research libraries. Our fast growing list of individual subscribers shows that an online BNA has great appeal to the serious birder and citizen scientists. Our list of college and research libraries includes a wide variety of institutions – from the USGS to Augustana College, UC Santa Cruz to the Natural History Museum of London, and from Univ. Laval to Stephen F. Austin State U.

We Need Your Help – We need more college and university subscribers. Our motives for this are both selfish and altruistic. Selfish because, to ensure continued development of BNA Online, we need the considerable funds that institutional subscriptions bring to the table. Altruistic because we’d like to see more students have access to the database; we’d like to broaden our base. BNA is an extraordinarily powerful tool for teaching and for developing interest in birds. But more people need to know about it.

You’re the key to spreading the word, and above all to getting your libraries to subscribe. But… Librarians need to hear from you before they’ll commit scarce library funds to BNA Online. Many of you have already stepped forward to help in this way, and we’re grateful. But we ask those of you who have yet to make the call – or send the email – to please do so now. Tell your librarians what a valuable resource BNA is; tell them of your own involvement in the project and how useful you think it will be for students and colleagues; tell them of the favorable reviews in the library journals; tell them you agree it’s a bargain. Remember what you’re getting with an online BNA: access campus-wide, 24/7; continual updates (now with NSF funding to facilitate this); the addition of rich media in the form of sound, video, and digital images; and searchability by species and topic. Big advantages, all of them.

We need photos – We still need good crisp photos that illustrate key aspects of the life history of your species. Please send photos to help fill in image galleries – especially eggs and nestlings, nests, key behaviors and plumages details, feeding behavior and food items, habitat, etc. See examples we’ve chosen in the BNA Online image galleries. Photos should be digital format – jpegs, and at least 600 pixels wide or high. Please mail me samples before assembling a large variety.

Thanks! – For past help with BNA, and for continued commitment. You have made this series possible; it’s 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!

ALAN