Sirenian Bibliography Now Online. – The Bibliography and Index of the Sirenia and Desmostylia by Daryl P. Domning, first published in hard-copy form by the Smithsonian Institution in 1996, is finally available in fully interactive and searchable digital form at http://www.sirenian.org/biblio/.

This long-sought goal has been accomplished with the help of Caryn Self-Sullivan and Sirenian International, who provided a home for the database in cyberspace and recruited Michael Bragg (Compendium Software Systems, LLC) to do the essential database programming and create the outstanding user interface. We all owe them a huge vote of thanks for making this research tool more readily available to the sirenian research and conservation community.

As you will see, the interface is very straightforward, user-friendly, attractive, and easy to navigate. The front material from the 1996 edition is reproduced (with updates) under the link “Introduction”; separate links give access to the Appendices; and the Bibliography and Index are each accessed by a “Browse” function. To provide cross-referencing by author within the Bibliography, hot links from all authors’ names yield lists of all works by each author. A “Search” function allows searching the entire Bibliography, including titles and annotations of works, for any name or word. A “Detail” utility brings up, for any main entry, all the associated Index entries for that work, providing more information about the work’s content beyond what can be gleaned from the title and annotation.

As for content, the database now covers the literature from 1494 to 2010. For the last several years of literature, however, I have not had the time to do exhaustive searches of other databases, so coverage of the literature since about 2003 is likely to be spotty. Users are encouraged to report to me (ddomning@howard.edu) any missing references that should be included, or errors needing correction. We are also working on a way for authors to input their own publications and make corrections on their own publications in the future.

I plan to continue administering the database for at least the time being, and incorporating new references as I become aware of them; but in the future I expect to focus mainly on paleontological literature, so updating of this bibliography will increasingly depend on others. If indeed our community considers this task worthwhile, it will require significant commitment by one or more dedicated and conscientious volunteers to whom I can eventually pass the torch. I respectfully request my colleagues, acting through our existing organs such as the IUCN/SSC Sirenia Specialist Group, Sirenian International, Inc., and/or the Save the Manatee Club, to undertake serious deliberations on whether this information-retrieval project should continue and, if so, who should undertake it.

If it is decided that this activity is to be continued, a further decision will need to be made concerning the level of detail to be provided in the database. I envision at least six options:

1. Inclusion of only simple literature citations (author-date-title-place of publication), machine-searchable but without any indexing.

3. General indexing only (indexing each work under a few subject headings, say one to five, mostly derivable from the title alone or from keywords provided in the work).

5. More detailed indexing (with page references and/or annotations in the index entries).

My original concept, partly achieved in the 1996 printed edition, included all options through #5. During the past year or so, when I had to catch up on a large backlog of new literature, I could do no better in most cases than #3. Going forward, I think #5 (the most labor-intensive) will be increasingly impractical given the flood of new literature. #4 will be difficult as well, though very desirable. #3 should be the minimum acceptable level of indexing. However, given that the entire text of the Bibliography is searchable, including annotations (and abstracts if these are included), it may be felt that this ability makes an index superfluous – although I caution strongly against naļve optimism in this regard! The ultimate ideal, of course, would be #6; but for most sources it lies well in the future of technology, and even that kind of brute-force information retrieval will miss information provided by a really good index. The decision is up to you, the future users of this database. – Daryl Domning