Data base for the Journal

[Phoenikakias]

I am a recent IPS member and admittedly the IPS journal 'Palms' (Principes) is a treasure of information, especially articles of local botanists on their native flora are very interesting.  Just to mention a couple of them as examples, one on Arenga in Thailand and another on Guihaia in China.  To my disappointment though I found out that an electronic index in the form of data base is available only for a small part of journal, all old b/w issues and most of the colorful ones are still missing from the index, and a reader searching for a particular topic, has to scroll through the individual index of each one of the older issues (after the whole issue is downloaded in pdf format). This is imo an enormous waste of time and imo an inexplicable flaw. I mean every issue contains 3 to 4 articles plus some  bulletins with botanical (ie not administrative ) interest. I do not consider  a heavy duty, that total content be sorted out in a digitized index according to concerned palm genus or even sp (with a simple link to the relevant issue of the journal, as it is already the situation with the more recent issues).  E.g.  I came recently entirely randomly across a most valuable and new information (for me and I bet also for many other European growers), that namely Phoenix rupicola (although a Phoenix) should be sensitive to chemical fertilizers (salt accumulation). It was for me as if I had discovered a new continent and it is such a great pity, that I can not find again easily (or at all!) the source of this information...

[Kim]

Hello Konstantinos. I can appreciate that your suggestion to create a fully searchable database would make the journals ever more useful. This section of PalmTalk is relatively inactive, so you might get more traction by contacting the IPS main email at:  info@palms.org  Another option is to contact Len Geiger (LJG on PalmTalk) who is a board member with web expertise. 

I hope these suggestions will be helpful. 

[mnorell]

Konstantinos--

Most websites don't have the programming budgets/abilities available to huge corporations like Google to implement the most thorough search-engines...and in fact Google has given us all the tools to do the search, using what is known as a "site search." This "operator" limits Google's results to the items it finds at a given url. Simply use this format:

"rupicola" "fertilize" site:palms.org

and you will receive a treasure-trove of results from Principes and related publications that reside on the palms.org site. You may still get some extraneous articles, but you may be amazed how much is there for you to peruse. Please note that you will get the most results by limiting your search terms to single-word items because--and this is just the reality of relying on OCR to digitize old printed materials--there are plenty of OCR errors and you may miss results if you try to find too complex (i.e., multi-word) of a term.

It is very useful to review the full complement of operators/switches/features (including Boolean logic) available to you in any Google search. This information is published by Google and also these many tools have been aggregated and explained in depth by many other sites, so if you search for terms like google search operators you will find many good resources to help you get the most out of your searches. Educating yourself on these tools will save you many, many hours in your research on the web.