Many people have complained about the cost of Speleological Abstracts, which brings me back again to the Karst Information Portal. The UIS (International Union of Speleology) is another partner in the Portal and Speleological Abstracts is produced by the UIS Bibliographic Commission. During the Commission's meeting at the International Congress of Speleology last year, the Commission members decided to wrap up the printed and CD version of Speleological Abstracts that are currently in the works and then work to merge Speleological Abstracts into the Karst Information Portal, where it will be free to everyone.
The Portal basically has three levels of information: 1) Reference only. This is like the old fashion library card catalogue where you just got the name of the publication but no other information. 2) Reference and abstract. This is like Speleological Abstracts, where you get a summary of the publication along with the reference. Many links to professional journal papers on the Portal take you to the abstract of the paper on the journal's website. In many cases the abstract tells you what you need to know. If you want more details, then the journal (NOT the Portal) requires you to pay a fee of typically $35 to get a PDF of the full paper. The Portal can't provide you these papers without violating copyright laws. 3) Full publication. This is the full publication. In many and increasingly more cases, the entire publications are fully text searchable by the Portal. So, for example, if you looking for information on Honey Creek Cave and you search on that name, you will find it mentioned in many publications that you wouldn't otherwise know about because they don't include the cave name in the title or as a keyword, but the publication may still have information you may find valuable. Back to Speleological Abstracts, one of things we are hoping to see happen with the transition to putting the information into the Portal is that the contributors, rather than collecting the articles and writing abstracts for them, would for less or similar effort collect a wider and larger array of articles that can directly be digitally archived and accessed via the Karst Information Portal. George ******************** George Veni, Ph.D. Executive Director National Cave and Karst Research Institute 400-1 Cascades Avenue Carlsbad, New Mexico 88220-6215 USA Office: 575-887-5517 Mobile: 210-863-5919 Fax: 575-887-5523 [email protected] www.nckri.org -----Original Message----- From: Mixon Bill [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 11:42 AM To: Cavers Texas Subject: [Texascavers] bibliographies If anyone wants to search through bibliographies, such as Speleological Abstracts (numbers 1-46 1974-2007) or Current Titles in Speleology (1-25 for 1969-1992) or more obscure things like Internationale Bibliographie für Speläelogie for 1950-1960, feel free to come by and spend a good amount of time digging. Speleological Abstracts for 24 years is available on a CD, but I don't have it--they want ~$300 for it.--Mixon ---------------------------------------- If you can't say something nice, come and sit by me. ---------------------------------------- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: [email protected] AMCS: [email protected] or [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
