[texbirds] Texas bird booking on the internet
- From: Joseph Kennedy <josephkennedy36@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: 4 Texbirds Maillist <texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 09:15:37 -0500
I have recently been building a birding and natural history library from
books available on the internet. Many of the old books about Texas are
available as are journal articles from recently and long ago.
Several relatively new sites offer large number of bird and other nature
and science related books and journals. It is surprising how much about
early texas is available in the British ornithological journals. Two major
sites are used by libraries and universities that scan old books and make
them available online. Texas universities are starting to take part with a
current emphasis on non-bird material such as the complete set of the Texas
Conchologist but Strecker's original texas checklist is there and journals
of the early explorers with notes on natural history.
Biodiversity Heritage Library with 2,820 bird related books. It has more
journals than the other site.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Default.aspx
All of the books on this site can be downloaded. For hummingbird fans,
Gould's monograph on the family complete with all pictures is there as
is Audubon's Texas journal and his birds of america is being added. Many
year of reading on rainy or really hot days.
Or you can revert to your childhood and go out in the field with Reed's
little green bird guide or Forbush's New England Guide. Many other
pre-peterson "id" are here. Try identifying birds with the books that
Peterson replaced and the limits that any bird-watcher had back in the old
days.
Hathi Trust is more difficult to use as non-members can only look at books
by page (5,181 bird books) or search books (another 9,761 bird books).
Apparently you have to have access through an organization such as a
university to download entire books.
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/
Google has a project to scan and make available all old books but many of
its scans are not as good or you have to pay to read them. The google books
are available through many sites, some paid and some free.
The old standard book site is Project Guttenberg which has a goal of
providing 1,000,000 books for unlimited free use in all standard formats.
They are starting to add the Bent Life Histories with the warbler volumes
just added
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Many of the journals and exploration books about the west and texas are
there too but the site has specialized in fiction and history etc. more
than scientific type books but is adding more in books like Bent.
And finally the Open Library project has been updated to make bird books
easier to find. It also identifies which are available as ebooks. The site
is a library search site so that the normal use is to find out which
library will lend the book or make it available in the stacks. Many of the
books cannot be used online but more and more of the ebooks can be
downloaded. The site only has 2,573 bird books but includes Aristophanes.
http://openlibrary.org/search?subject_facet=Birds&subject_facet=Accessible+book
Some newer books are out there too. Paul Johnsgard has made his books
including Birds of the Great Plains which covers the panhandle, and his
duck and crane books free online at
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/johnsgard/
It is important to remember that while many of these books can be used
freely, they cannot be distributed freely. So you can download and read or
add them to a library but they cannot be distributed to others etc. For
many there is a long chain of copyright and other limits of use such as
when Harvard lets Google copy books, a google user edits the raw google
copy and adds it to an online library which is then referenced from another
site.
There are 2 basic books types available. Ebooks are the new book format
that can be used on all computers, pads, phones etc. Depending on the
source, the books may be available in proprietary format such as those
purchased from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The epub format is the general
free use format that can be used on all computers, phones etc except where
the hardware maker bans them.
The other book format is adobe files which can include material typed like
an online help file and would appear very much like an ebook. Or, and this
is the source of most of the old books, each page of a book is scanned and
the scanned pages are compiled into a pdf file which can be used on almost
all devices. Books like Gould's Hummingbirds are done this way.
The best way to build a library is on a computer as it has room for many
books and many of those are large. I use Calibre which is a free open
source program that lets you index and sort and do whatever you want with
all of your books. Even better it lets you readily convert books from one
format to another. It is upgraded and improved almost weekly.
http://calibre-ebook.com/
You can download the free epub Bent Warbler book from Guttenberg and
convert it for your kindle, iphone or whatever you have. Likewise you can
take a kindle book and read it on your computer or another device. Again be
sure to read and follow the copyright rules on your books.
All of the books can then be exported to your phone or pad.
Even better you can download any web pages out there and import them into
Calibre where you convert them into a short book. For example there are a
couple of web sites that provide guides to birding in the Rio Grande
Valley. They are not very helpful way upriver where there is no reception
but the converted guide to say Falcon State Park can be used offline. Again
it saves data charges if that is important. Again, even more important,
the web sites belong to the owner of the site as does all the information
so make sure that your use complies with what is legal.
As an example, I can go to my website and select the 2012 hawk watch page,
save it to my computer as an html web page to my computer, drop the
downloaded file onto calibre, convert it to an epub, export it to my iphone
and I have a book to show visitors to the hawk watch tower what I have seen
and photographed this year. I can send the same page to any kindle, android
phone or other device too. Great for the times the cell service is less
that useful.
Or you can do a little cutting and pasting from sites like texbirds, ebird
etc and have maps, detailed instructions of where to go, pictures and the
latest news about a rare bird out in big bend where you really do not get
phone service. But again, be sure to know what the use rules are for the
sites. Most allow personal use but not any form of shared use without
permission.
Lots of good reading out there.
--
Joseph C. Kennedy
on Buffalo Bayou in West Houston
Josephkennedy36@xxxxxxxxx
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