Smith, V.S. (2010). Lice on the Web: A workshop on the new Phthiraptera website
Forth-International Congress on Phthiraptera (ICP4)., Urgup, Cappadocia, Turkey. 13 -18 June.
Okay - this workshop is a follow-on from my presentation yesterday in which I talked about how we can move more taxonomic information on the web. As I said yesterday it is becoming essential for any taxonomic community to establish a strong web presence. This is now mandated by many funding agencies who see the web as a way of creating a centralized source of basic information, especially for taxonomy. What I want to do today I cover the more practical aspects of doing this, and my goal is really to achieve two things. Firstly I’d like to come away from today with commitment from a few members of the community to engage with this process, sharing the load of developing content on this site. Secondly I want to test the water a bit and get a sense of whether we could be a bit more organised in terms of data collection. At present when we publish information there is no mandate to put the underlying data anywhere. Ultimatly I’d like to be in a position whereby we recommend, and perhaps eventually mandate that that data goes into a centralised resource such that it can be more efficiently reused. The kind of information I’m talking about is mainly taxonomy data - so that is things like new species descriptions, and in particular new host parasite associations. As I said yesterday it took over 20 years of work for Roger Price, Ricardo Palma and Ron Hellenthall to put together the data on the 2003 louse checklist. Its likely we will never be able to get that kind of effort together again to produce a new checklist. For that reason we need to start working together more effectinvly to create that kind of data resource, because ultimatly this is what this website is about.
With this in mind there are two ways of running this workshop and its very much dependent on the level of interest. If there is lots of interest (in other words more than about 15 people in the room without laptop computers) then the best approach is from me to run through a powerpoint presentation that covers these issues, followed by a show and tell where I demonstrate some of these on the web, and we end up with a discussion on issues to do with new content areas, and identify some people that would like to get nore involved. If there is less interest (by that I mean a handful of people with laptops we might ignore the powerpoint, and do a much more practical session. Looking at the size of the audience my guess is that we are going to have to focus on the powerpoint, followed by a show and tell by me. We can then move on to a generalized discussion. I should stress that as I do this feel free to shout out questions and comments. So as I go through the powerpoint I’ll firstly recap on what information is on the current site and how this has moved to the new site. We can then go through a kind of shopping list on what the new site can do with some specific examples from the louse site. I’ll also say a few things on what the sites can’t do. Finally we can have a more generalised discussion on the future. Having said that let me say a few words about where we are One thing I should do from the start is to dispel one of the misconceptions about moving data to the web, and that is that this process is going to be completely painless. In reality is not that easy. Most people don’t care about the practicalities of getting data on the web - they simply care about the product - not the process. Unfortunately this isn’t a magical process - there is some pain involved but hopefully that pain can be minimized.
Having said that lets look at where we are. So just to recap this is the data on the site so far… We have research profiles for nearly 300 Phthirpaterists,…
I have a small team of volunteers doing this work to date.
But ultimatly we need more people - and that means you. My ultimate goal is not only for you to Why should you do this…
Practicalities Logging in Profiles (linked author) Bibliography Taxonomy Louse-host associations