Where is the damned collection?

Charles Davies Sherborn (30 June 1861 – 22 June 1942) was an English taxonomist who described himself as '’a magpie” with a “card-index mind'. Sherborn wrote the famous Index Animalium, an 11 volume, 9,000 page work that catalogued the 444,000 names of every living and extinct animal discovered between 1758 and 1850. This work is considered the bibliographic foundation for current zoological nomenclature and he single-handedly worked 43 years on it. 

Until now, Sherborn’s contribution has been recognized and relied upon by professional taxonomists worldwide but he has escaped the celebration of his accomplishment that is his due. This changed on 28 October 2011, with a symposium held in his honour at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, on the 150th year of his birth. 

The symposium included an international panel of experts on bibliography and biodiversity bioinformatics who linked a view of the past with an active debate on the future of these related fields. All talks were recorded and online material includes slides and poster downloads. The resulting papers were published last week in ZooKeys and here they are. The papers in this volume fall into three general areas. In the first section, seven papers present different facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describe the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. In the second section, five papers (with a major appendix) discuss current tools and innovations for bringing legacy information into the modern age. The final section, with three papers, tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy.

Ellinor Michel

Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond

Neal Evenhuis

Charles Davies Sherborn and the “Indexer’s Club”

Karolyn Shindler

A magpie with a card-index mind – Charles Davies Sherborn 1861–1942

Gordon McOuat

Naming and Necessity: Sherborn’s Context in the 19th Century

Giles Miller

Sherborn’s foraminiferal studies and their influence on the collections at the Natural History Museum, London

Michael A. Taylor

‘Where is the damned collection?’ Charles Davies Sherborn’s listing of named natural science collections and its successors

Edward C. Dickinson

Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn’s and Richmond’s historical legacy of bibliographic exploration

Christian Thompson, Thomas Pape

Sherborn’s influence on Systema Dipterorum

Suzanne C. Pilsk, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Joel M. Richard

Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits

Francisco Welter-Schultes, Angela Görlich , Alexandra Lutze

Sherborn’s Index Animalium: New names, systematic errors and availability of names in the light of modern nomenclature

Christopher Lyal

Digitising legacy zoological taxonomic literature: Processes, products and using the output

David Remsen

The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics

Miguel Alonso-Zarazaga, Daphne Fautin, Ellinor Michel
The List of Available Names (LAN): A new generation for stable taxonomic names in zoology?

Lyubomir Penev, Alan Paton, Nicola Nicolson, Paul Kirk, Richard Pyle, Robert Whitton, Teodor Georgiev, Christine Barker, Christopher Hopkins, Vincent Robert, Jordan Bisserkov, Pavel Stoev

A common registration-to-publication automated pipeline for nomenclatural acts for higher plants (International Plant Names Index, IPNI), fungi (Index Fungorum, MycoBank) and animals (ZooBank)

Roderic Page

Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy

Richard Pyle

Towards a Global Names Architecture: The future of indexing scientific names

Miguel Alonso-Zarazaga, Philippe Bouchet, Richard Pyle, Nikita Kluge, Daphne Fautin
Manual for proposing a Part of the List of Available Names (LAN) in Zoology

Very interesting reads and a nice combination of history and contemporary thoughts on naming in the digital age. I particularly liked Rod Page's quote: DNA barcoding may give a new lease of life to old names.