Yvonne pointed out that I misspoke when
I said that the BBS does not have copies of the
original publications that their abstracts come
from. Apparently they do, and could provide
copies of articles if necessary, although they
encourage users to contact national caving
organizations first. That would be the NSS in our case.
Mark
At 11:24 AM 3/21/2014, Mark Minton wrote:
I agree that Speleo Digest was a great
publication. I refer to mine often when
researching what's known about specific caves.
There is an international alternative to Speleo
Digest, and that is Speleological Abstracts /
Bulletin Bibliographique Spéléologique
<http://ssslib.ch/bbs/public/anglais/index.htm>
put out by the UIS (Union Internationale de
Spéléologie / International Union of
Speleology). Of course it will not be so
focused on American publications, but does
cover some of them, including the NSS News,
AMCS Activities Newsletter and West Virginia
Caver. They would be happy to cover more U. S.
publications if someone would take the time to
send them abstracts. (My partner Yvonne does
the NSS News and WV Caver.) It is by far the
easiest way to find information on caves in
other countries. Unlike Speleo Digest, it does
not select specific articles, but rather
provides abstracts of every article in each
issue of the publications it covers. That
doesn't serve to weed out the bad from the
good, but at least the information is there and
searchable. Actually getting a copy of an
article you're interested is another issue.
They don't have the newsletters themselves,
only the abstracts sent in by their
collaborators. Fortunately more and more
newsletters are becoming available online.
Mark
At 11:59 PM 3/20/2014, Mixon Bill wrote:
Even if all grotto newsletters were on line and publicly accessible,
that wouldn't substitute for the Speleo Digest. What it did is weed
out the stuff (vast majority of most newsletters) of no permanent
value and gather the rest into one convenient collection. Certainly it
did an incomplete job of that, but a lot better than nothing. I'm not
going to spend a lot of time browsing the web to find stuff I don't
even know is there. Sure, if I wanted a map of XYZ Cave, Google might
turn up the newsletter it is in if it's on the web somewhere, but what
if I've never even heard of XYZ Cave but might like to?
Oh, well, as I said, R.I.P. -- Mixon
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