The Raptor Literature in Eastemasia Concems (8
kr- l1 TheRaptor Literature Lr,ovo F. Krrr relevant raptor literatrye, rather than providing a thor- The Peregrine Fund, oughhistorical review. We focuson regionsmost famil- 5668 W. Flying Hawk Lane, Boise, ID 83709 U.S'A. iar to us, and have touchedlightly on the raptor litera- ture of someparts of the world. Ron G Blr.srrll Raptor researcherssuffer from two chronic prob- Doldersummerweg 1,7983 LD Wapse,The Netherlands lems: too little information and too much information. Traditionally,most researchers, regardless of their dis- Lucrl LIU Snvrnrrcruus cipline,have suffered from a lackof accessto thewhole Research Center for Biodiversity, spectrumof global literature. Few libraries offer com- Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 115 prehensivecoverage ofall typesofraptor literature,and even now, the major online abstracting services, Jnvcnxr Snnnclltx althoughextremely valuable, do not yet provideaccess Falconry Heritage Trust, to the full text of most articles.Language differences P.O. Box 19, Carmarthen,Dyfed SA335YL, U.K. also have posedperennial barriers to communication, and few, if any, abstractingservices adequately cover the literaturein all of the world'smajor languages. Now, with a flood of information on its way onto INTRODUCTION the worldwide web, we run thb risk of descendingfrom the InformationAge into a stateof information chaos. We are currently experiencinga dramatic change in As a result,raptor literatureis becomingincreasingly scholarlydisciplines, as we shift from traditionalprint vast and amorphous.In his chapteron this topic in the publicationsto electronic forms of communication. first editionof this manual,LeFranc (1987) stated that Duringthis transition,many venerable joumals are pro- approximately370 and 1,030 raptor-relaledpublica- ducingparallel electronic versions and others are com- tionswere listed in the 1970and 1980issues of Wildlife pletely discontinuingtheir print versions.
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