Thanks to support from the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) is adding a large body of legacy publications to its database this year. The source of the data is the annual reports of the United States National Museum (USNM) from the 1870s to the 1960s which often included an appendix listing staff publications. Some years there was no data listed, for example during World War II. The data capture project identified nearly 18,000 items and of these, over 6,000 items have been added to the SRO database since April 2014. These are primarily papers authored by USNM staff and affiliates and published by commercial or society journals.
These 6,000 or so publications represent only those most easily imported. Anyone who has read the old USNM Annual Reports will see that publications were listed in haphazard format (if at all) and the contractor who re-typed this data could not be expected to account for all variations and possibilities. For this reason, Libraries staff will spend much of the rest of the summer editing, verifying and continuing to add these publications to the SRO database with the balance expected to be added by September 30 of this year.
Readers can view a sample of the data by following links for some of the most productive authors in the data so far: Willam Healy Dall, Harrison Dyar, Charles V. Riley.
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