Biodiversity and Heritage Definitions

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What does "Biodiversity" mean in terms of BHL Collection Development?

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, an international organ to prepare an international legal instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity uses this definition:

"Biological diversity" means the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia (Latin for amongst other things), terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.

http://www.cbd.int/convention/articles.shtml?a=cbd-02

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What does "Heritage" mean in terms of BHL Collection Development?


Definition of heritage, from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary:

• noun 1 property that is or may be inherited; an inheritance. 2 valued things such as historic buildings that have been passed down from previous generations. 3 before another noun relating to things of historic or cultural value that are worthy of preservation.

- ORIGIN Old French, from heriter 'inherit'.

• it is the third definition that is most appropriate to our efforts.

• Synonyms for Heritage from the open access Moby Wikipedia Thesaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project 65 Moby Thesaurus words for "heritage":
  • Altmann theory, DNA, De Vries theory, Galtonian theory, Mendelianism, Mendelism, RNA, Verworn theory, Weismann theory, Weismannism, Wiesner theory, allele, allelomorph, bequeathal, bequest, birth, birthright, borough-English, character, chromatid, chromatin, chromosome, coheirship, coparcenary, determinant, determiner, diathesis, endowment, entail, estate, eugenics, factor, gavelkind, gene, genesiology, genetic code, genetics, heirloom, heirship, hereditability, hereditament, heredity, heritability, heritable, heritance, inborn capacity, incorporeal hereditament, inheritability, inheritance, law of succession, legacy, line of succession, matrocliny, mode of succession, patrimony, patrocliny, pharmacogenetics, postremogeniture, primogeniture, recessive character, replication, reversion, succession, tradition, ultimogeniture Source: Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0

• Taxonomic names are at the heart of our library ==> form part of the heritage of scientific thought and the heritage of individual species
  • TaxonFinder tool builds a searchable heritage of species names (associates synonymous names together?)

• The literature itself has it's own heritage
  • Besides species heritage there is also heritage with respect to titles (title changes, editions, etc.), authors (Asa Gray's Botany textbooks are applicable to BHL for their heritage value), subjects (historic popular literature relevant to biodiversity ex. Wallace's Amazonian journey)

Therefore, BHL Heritage Elements are:

• taxonomic names
• titles
• authors
• subjects
  • another subject example besides popular literature? comparative anatomy?
• publishers?
• dates? Such as what is the rough date cut-off for historical Agriculture, as in modern Ag lit. is not as taxonomically relevant as historical Ag lit.
• What other heritage elements are there that should be articulated, if any?

==>Does the subject matter covered by a title lie within a heritage of terms of value to biodiversity studies?