An initiative to develop a common repository of algal taxonomic literature for budding algal taxonomists of India

Dear Prof. Baruah and learned Phycologist,

Thank you for your initiative to start the repository of the Algal taxonomic literature of India. It is a nice idea and a much-needed requirement to save algal research in India. 

I will try my best whatever possible to contribute. From Prof. Adhikary I received his cyanobacterial cultures and voucher specimens collected during the AICOPTAX project maintaining it in the Visva-Bharati Culture Collection of Algae. But most of the taxonomic literature is with Dr. Sudipta Kumar Das and Dr. Mrutynjay Jena.  But whatever taxonomic literature of Indian Algae with me I can share with you.

In this initiative, I have a suggestion.  Let's make this literature digital. We can collect the literature to make an Endnote database and put it in a dropbox accessible to all the psychologists of India. If you need any help I can help with this. Since many of the literature are old and not available anywhere it is very much essential to preserve them in the digital platform and if we keep this valuable resource in cloud-like Dropbox it will be easy to accessible to all at the time of need and help students. There will be also new publications from the taxonomic account of algae so we also need to keep windows open for that. So if we make it open in a cloud whoever has a new publication can upload and update it instantly.  Since it is a voluminous work once the platform is ready each one of us can add the literature which we have. 

I have also another suggestion. In this WhatsApp, age why not make a WhatsApp Group of Indian Phycologists but strictly no forwarding messages, Good morning messages etc Just on developments on Indian Algae. So if someone gets a new publication on Algae of India can just WhatsApp in the Group. Thanks to you for collecting the e-mail Id of many of the phycologists of India, we can also keep an Excel sheet in dropbox to include contact details of all phycologists and their specialization, mobile numbers, etc for better coordination and development in this field. 

The legendary Phycologists have a great contribution and we need to carry forward that to the next generation of phycologists. So far we are not well coordinated and because of that loosing also the Algal names our legendary phycologists established in India. For example, the young researches of India use the latest monographs of Komarek for identification of but in that, we don't have many Indian species included. Manual of Prof Desikachary is not available and the student follows Komarek's manual and many Indian species of cyanobacteria now wrongly Identified.

I really appreciate your Initiatives and now in this digital age lets make a digital repository of Algal literature accessible to all.

With my Best Regards

Jnanendra

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Dr. Jnanendra Rath 

Raman, NIH Fellow (USA)

Assistant Professor (Stage-III)
Department of Botany
Institute of Science
Visva-Bharati (A Central University)