Please send requests with payment (check/cheque, money order or bank draft in US dollars) made out to the SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION) to: Linda Ward, Department of Invertebrate Zoology, NHB MRC 163, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560, USA.
"I want to take this opportunity to answer all of the questions I have been receiving concerning the Polychaete Bibliography on CD-ROM.
1.) We have plenty of copies of the CD, the cost is $15.00 and that includes postage.
2.) Payment MUST be in cash or a check made out to the "Smithsonian Institution " in US dollars.
3.) We can not accept credit card payments, our department is not able to handle them. I know that it would be easier for those of you outside the US but I'm afraid that it just isn't possible.
4.) If you send a request for the CD via e-mail I will file the request away until the money has arrived to pay for it. Otherwise we run into bookkeeping problems at this end.
5.) I have not tried it on a MAC myself so I can't be sure but as far as I know the CD doesn't work on MAC's, it is strictly for PC's. It can be run in Window s 3.1 and I see no reason for it not to work in Windows 95 since the software is all on the CD and is not actually installed onto your computer.
6.) Updates, etc. The CD was originally created as a test for the Smithsonian Press to see if they wanted to get into this type of publication. The bibliography was not proofed prior to moving the data to the CD software and it was not culled for duplicate or non-polychaete entries. The software (Romware) was also poorly documented and awkward to use. The CD had approximately 10,000 entries a nd our current personal-use bibliography has in the neighborhood of 16,000 citations. I would like to re-issue the bibliography but it requires a lot of clean-up which I have begun but things like our 2 government shutdowns, the blizzard and general staffing cutbacks has slowed my progress tremendously. There is also a question about what format to issue it in. Robin Wilson spent a lot of time moving our bibliography into a bibliographic software package called Papyrus. I have been using this program to enter new records and I have also spent a lot of time trying to standardize spelling of things like author names and journals.
Robin also appended to this bibliography records that he had downloaded from Zoo. Rec. and Biol. Abstracts. I have talked with the people that oversee these 2 on-line databases and found that if I include these downloaded records in a bibliography that I issue I will have to pay them a licensing fee of $3.00/citation. Even after the duplicates are deleted I suspect that there would be several thousand citations for which I would have to pay this licensing fee and that is just not feasible.
I am aiming to have a relatively clean version of the bibliography ready to re-issue by this fall (assuming we don't have anymore shutdowns or blizzards, or large "Literature Cited" sections to review for Kristian and Greg). I would like to see it go on the World Wide Web in some format as I think it will be the easiest, most cost effective, way to do it and keep it up dated. For those who don't have Web access but are on the Internet it could also go on the Smithsonian Gopher server I think. I would also like to see it go out as a Papyrus bibliography either compressed on disks or on a CD but as far as I know there is not a MAC version of Papyrus at this time. It does work in DOS, Windows 3+ and Windows 95. Once a decision has been made I will let the group know."