Sources and method

What was done

What was deliberately not done

• No historical spelling, name or wording was corrected — not even obvious typographical errors, and not even where two discs spell the same person's name differently.
• No historical taxonomy was replaced with a modern one. The three name schemes the work carried are published as they stand.
• No coordinate was converted to a decimal position, plotted or georeferenced.
• No mastering defect was repaired.
• No two records were merged because they looked like the same thing.
• No uncertain reading was adopted in order to make a page look complete.

The introduction, by disc

The introduction is not one document. Each disc carries its own, and the site reads the Disc 1 · 2011 version by default. The 2006 disc added pages the 2001 disc did not have and changed the editorial policy on vagrant species; the 2011 disc dropped five corrections the 2006 disc carried. Every introduction page offers the other discs' wording where it differs, under that disc's own label; nothing is merged.

How the pages were divided

The pages are numbered and titled exactly as each disc's own index records them. The division of the running text into those pages is worked out by this project from the ordered content — derived from the accepted CD03 boundaries by index-title correspondence plus mechanical segment-stream alignment (CD03 136 segments -> CD01 131 segments); closed by contiguity — because the original program's page-link bytes were never decoded. It is the best-supported sequence, not a proven reproduction of the original page flow, and each introduction page records it under its source details.

Pictures and recordings on the introduction pages

The work names each picture, map and recording on a page by a file stem in a caption record of its own. The site shows that caption as the caption, matched to the file by the stem; the stem, the record's separators and the file's location are kept under each page's provenance. Where an item sat on the original page was never recorded and is not guessed. One caption record, for the Picinguaba coast on the page about ornithology in Brazil, names a picture that the earlier extraction could not match because of a decoding error; it is matched here from the caption record itself.

Verified counts

These are checked on every build. If any of them changed, the build would stop rather than publish a site whose contents had silently drifted.