Library publishing guidelines

Publishing to the library is a generous thing to do, and it is how the library has grown. Everything in it is available to everybody, free accounts included.

When you publish, the item comes to us for a short review. We are not checking your ornithology — we are checking a handful of things that decide whether other people can find your item and understand what they are getting.

Updating something you have already published is easy: change it as you normally would and publish again. Everybody using it is offered the update.

Please make sure you have permission from the original author before publishing somebody else’s work to the library.

In general

We prefer items to be complete. People reasonably assume that a list called Beetles of Norfolk covers the beetles of Norfolk, so gaps are confusing rather than merely incomplete. Where completeness is out of reach, narrowing the scope is usually better than leaving holes — Shield Bugs & Allies rather than True Bugs. If an item genuinely is partial, end its name with (Partial) so nobody is caught out.

Taxonomies in particular

A taxonomy is referenced directly by people’s records, which makes changing one more delicate than changing a checklist.

• The taxonomy editor deprecates rather than deletes anything that might be in use, so installing your update never damages somebody’s records. Deprecated taxa disappear from the list of species to enter from but still show against existing records. Tools ▸ Taxonomic Updates is where people then work through what your change means for their own journal, and Tools ▸ Replace Species applies the replacements.
• Prefer editing an existing taxon to replacing it. Fixing a name on the taxon that is already there makes for a clean upgrade; deleting it and adding a corrected one turns a silent fix into work for everybody who uses it.

What we check

The name follows the usual structure — [Wildlife category] of [Region], [Country], with the region optional. So Birds of the United Kingdom, or Butterflies of Texas, United States. Where a region spans several countries the region alone is fine: Mammals of the Western Palearctic, Amphibians of North America.

Names use & rather than “and”, for brevity and consistency — Cetaceans & Sharks of the United Kingdom.

The wildlife category is an existing one where possible. Categories are the broad grouping people use to organise their observations, so they should be in English and reuse what is already there — Birds, Mammals, Insects, Moths and so on. There is no rule tying them to a particular taxonomic rank.

Species have local names. This matters most when you have included subspecies: without a local name on the species, the scientific name is all anyone has to search by. Where a species has a local name and a subspecies does not, Bird Journal shows the subspecies as Local Name (ssp) — the subspecies epithet in brackets after the species name — which makes it easy to recognise. Local names on subspecies themselves are welcome where they exist.

What we prefer

Family groupings, where you have them. They make a taxonomy considerably more useful for browsing and reporting.