“No scientific subject relies as heavily on an accumulation of literature (as opposed to current literature) as taxonomy.” ‐ Clive A. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 2nd ed., Edward Arnold, London, 1989.
It is a rare plant that has just one name, and a rare botanist who does not spend hours filtering out incorrect ones. According to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, the correct name is the earliest one, so much botanical research involves intensive literature searching to track down the first description of the plant in question. (The authors of the Code were not complete masochists ‐ the rule of priority for plants has a cutoff date of 1753, when Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum.)
The major tool for locating citation data for seed plant names is the venerable Index Kewensis, begun in 1893 by B. Dayton Jackson with the support of J.D. Hooker and funds bequeathed by Charles Darwin. The original Index comprised two large volumes, and 20 supplements have since been added. A similar endeavor began one year earlier at the US Department of Agriculture with Ms Josephine A. Clark, the USDA Librarian. This project moved to Harvard and became the Gray Herbarium Card Index. Each card listed the name of a vascular plant and its citation. The Gray cards listed only New World species, but included all vascular plants rather than just seed plants, and since the early 1970s have included infraspecific names (names below the rank of species, such as varieties or subspecies).
The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) unites these two fundamental sources of botanical bibliographic information and also includes the Australian Plant Names Index. Searches retrieve records from all three data sets, with the source of each record indicated by an abbreviation. Botanical citation data are not a newcomer to electronic media, and in fact the Gray cards were available via a gopher server in 1992 and are now freely searchable online at http://www. herbaria.harvard.edu/Data/Gray/gray.html The Index Kewensis, on the other hand, was until recently only available electronically on a CD‐ROM, selling for £995 from Oxford University Press.
The Web interface for IPNI is attractive, uncluttered, and easy to use. The “Search Plant Names” form allows users to enter terms for various taxonomic levels of names, titles of publications, and name‐author abbreviations. So, for instance, a user could search for all species of the genus Nyssa which were authored by J. K. Small, or all species in the Violaceae which have been described in the journal Rhodora. Author searches may be further refined by searching for only basionym authors (i.e. authors of the original description of the plant if it was first described as a member of a different genus) or only taxon name authors (authors who first published a particular binomial combination). A set of check‐boxes allows users to search the three component data sets individually or in any combination.
Search speed is good, considering the amount of data. The search tips suggest ways to make searching more efficient (for instance, don’t include a family name unless it is really necessary). Searches involving entire families or very large genera (e.g. Carex) will take a while. Users have the option of downloading their search results, but the search form warns that this may be slow. Especially for more computer‐savvy users, this will likely be a popular feature, since large blocks of data may be downloaded for offline searching and manipulation.
From the main menu, users may also choose to search files of authors, publications, and collectors. All of these allow searching by abbreviation, a welcome feature for libraries without copies of Botanico Periodicum Huntianum and BPH Supplementum (Pittsburgh: Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, 1968 and 1991), the traditional weapons for decoding botanical journal abbreviations. The collector database is an additional bonus, although it should be noted that collectors have no direct bearing on nomenclature.
The creators of IPNI have provided considerable context for the immense amount of data which they have made available. The Web site provides information on the kinds of editorial tasks which remain to be done and on how users may become involved in the editorial process. The pages “About the Index” and “Understanding the Data” are especially useful in making sure that users understand what they are searching and the meaning of the records which they retrieve. A note on citing the database is also provided.
The usefulness of this resource for botanical and horticultural libraries is obvious, but it would be worth bookmarking on reference terminals at more general science libraries. It is a tool for professional botanists and is unlikely to be of use to undergraduates. If it is made available to patrons through a library “Internet resources” page, it should be noted that it is not an appropriate source for finding general information about a plant, only for citation data on plant names. Highly recommended for academic libraries.
