More GUIDs

Idylly Googling, I stumbled across The Knowledge Bank at OSU, a DSpace server at Ohio State University. A number of publications on ants are listed there, complete with PDFs. For example, "The Mating Activities of the Ant Myrmica Americana Weber" by Kannowski and Kannowski, published in The Ohio Journal of Science in 1957. This paper has a GUID in the form of a Handle (hdl:1811/4489). What I find interesting is that digitisation efforts by libraries are putting biodiversity literature online as part of a broader effort (i.e., we get these papers, and a GUID, "for free"). This also raises issues about duplication of effort — clearly, if a library has put a PDF online, we don't want to duplicate this. Hence, we need a simple way of finding whether a paper has already been digitised. Google Scholar may be useful for this, although in this case Google finds the paper but Google Scholar doesn't.