Dear Colleagues;
There are several web-related developments that we would like
to bring to your attention. This message is being posted to the
Mollusca, Deepsea, FastMoll, and Eurosquid discussion lists.
First, we want to announce a new method of access to the on-
line cephalopod bibliography at the Smithsonian Institution. Our
key-word, searchable database of references is now accessible via
the world wide web. The address is
http://www.siris.si.edu
Access, searches, and down-loading of the results via the web are
considerably more user friendly then previous access via telnet.
With the assistance of a new volunteer, Jeannine Washington,
new records currently are being processed and added to the
database. There are now more than 4600 references in the system
and we are working on a backlog of approximately 500 references
ready to be entered. Here are a couple of pointers when using
the web access to the cephalopod bibliography:
When you have arrived at the SIRIS home page, choose the
option Search SIRIS Catalogs, then choose Research Bibliographies
Catalogs, and your are presented with the Search Options. SIRIS
search options are Keyword, Author, Title, and Subject. The
Subject-keywords we have used for the cephalopod bibliography are
listed for the user by choosing either Explain keyword search or
Explain subject search.
At this time all bibliographic databases are maintained by the
Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) as
one large file. Because of this, when searching for cephalopod
references, you will find references in the marine mammal
database as well. In the near future the cephalopod and marine
mammal bibliographies will be retrievable jointly, or separately
to ovoid duplication, etc.
We ask that users do an author search for their name (ex.,
Smith, R.) and check the results for missing references and send
us reprints that have not been previously sent (ie., not in the
backlog). Also, errors are inevitable, please take a moment and
notify us at cephbox at sivm.si.edu.
Second, some of you may not have seen the announcement on the
cephalopod tree-of-life. With a lot of help from others, Dick
Young, Katharina Mangold and I (MV) have put together a
Cephalopoda section for the Tree-of-Life project on the World
Wide Web (see Science 273:568-570). We invite you to take a look
at it. The URL for the Tree-of-Life is
http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html
Viewers will find a link to the cephalopod pages in the
Introduction. It was placed there by David Madisson to highlight
the cephs as one of the showcase groups. As with all web
projects, we envision this as constantly being subject to
revision. We welcome comments and suggestions.
Third, we have added more publications and video files to our
Cephalopods in Action web site. This is a multimedia appendix to
publications based on videotapes of deep-sea cephalopods. The
site was recently awarded the Editor's Choice Award by the
LookSmart web directory (Reader's Digest). Its URL is
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/cephs/
Best wishes for the New Year,
Mike Sweeney, Mike Vecchione, Clyde Roper.
