Acknowledgments

Many individuals and organizations have contributed in various ways to the development of this work. In the paragraphs below some of those contributions are individually noted and acknowledged. As this work has now consumed parts of more than 30 years of my professional life, and as its connections reach into nearly every corner of the neuropterological community, and more thinly across the global community of entomologists, it is not possible to note all contributions individually. My thanks to all of you who are not specifically mentioned below, but who have contributed to this project in a myriad of different ways over the years.

To all of my neuropterist friends and colleagues around the world, I offer my thanks for your past and continuing efforts to help build and improve the Bibliography by sending me your personal publication lists, specialized reference lists, "additions" lists, corrections notes, reprints, photocopies, digital files, etc., so that we can build an increasingly comprehensive and useful resource for our research community. All of your contributions, large and small, have helped to shape the Bibliography. Your works constitute a substantial portion of the materials that are cited in and linked to the Bibliography. To date, more than 530 of you have explicitly granted personal permissions to the BotN project to post of copies of your works. The success of this project as a comprehensive community resource depends critically upon your continued support and good will.

Several individuals have provided particularly noteworthy help in specialized areas. Levente Abrahám and András Bozsik have provided special assistance in treating the Hungarian neuropteran literature. For ten years in the 1990's and 2000's Agostino Letardi provided annual lists of errata and references not found in earlier versions of the Bibliography. These were very helpful in developing and correcting the Bibliography citation list during that period and particularly emphasized the Italian literature. More recently, we have shared information and collaborated on the production of periodic literature lists for the International Association of Neuropterology’s newsletter, Lacewing News, which has helped to keep the Bibliography up to date. The assistance of Vladimir Makarkin has been indispensable in treating the Russian neuropterological literature. He has cheerfully responded to my numerous requests for translations, transliterations and corrections of Russian citations, and has provided copies of many important works treating both extant and fossil neuropterans. Florian Weihrauch has provided special assistance with some neuropterological literature in German. Andy Whittington has provided information derived from the collection of neuropterological literature contained in the Royal Scottish Museum, contributing to the documentation of European, and particularly British, neuropterists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Peter McEwen, Lara Senior and John Ruberson have each, at different times, provided assistance with citations on economic neuropterology. Andy Whittington, Agostino Letardi and Levente Abrahám have provided special assistance in obtaining permissions from publishers in their countries in order to help develop the digital library aspects of the Bibliography.

Special thanks is due to my good friend and colleague Norm Penny who has supported and encouraged the Bibliography project throughout our long association. In late 1994 Norm helped push the Bibliography in the direction of electronic publication by arranging for the first online version (Version 4.0) to be implemented as a gopher site on a server at the California Academy of Sciences. All subsequent versions of the Bibliography have been delivered digitally, which greatly facilitated the extension of the Bibliography in the early 1990's into the digital library realm when easily distributable digital facsimile files in PDF format became increasingly popular and available. The continued support and encouragement of fellow bibliophile Horst Aspöck has also been much appreciated over the years.

During my years as a postdoctoral fellow (1991-1995) at the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History), Oliver Flint provided unrestricted access to the extensive collection of neuropterid reprints then under his care. Access to this collection was especially important for documenting the separates of publications by Longinos Navás.

Graduate Students

Several graduate students have provided substantive assistance with different versions of the Bibliography. Joshua Jones and Krishna Tadi were largely responsible for the technical development of the first Lacewing Digital Library-based interface of the Bibliography (version 8.0). That general interface has been continued and extended in subsequent versions. Most of the graphical and design elements of this interface were initially produced by Joshua and implemented by Joshua and Krishna. Joshua also played an important role in helping to conceptualize the organization and presentation of page and data elements for the interface. Krishna undertook primarily responsibility for the more technical aspects of site networking, the ColdFusion scripting originally associated with the site's searching and reporting functionality, and back-end database development and maintenance. For version 9.0, Rakesh Parvataneni was primarily responsibility for technical implementation. Several other students (see the LDL Project Team Page) have contributed more recently to the development and maintenance of subsequent versions of the Bibliography as part of their work on multiple LDL modules.

In 1997, computer science students Murtaza Sonaseth and Ravi Wijayaratne were responsible for the technical development of Bibliography Version 6.0. That version, with an adjustable, three-frame, single screen, user interface was the first interactively searchable version of the Bibliography and was developed as part of a graduate course in computer-based Information Storage and Retrieval at Texas A&M University.

In 2018, Sam Howard completed a major new literature search for additional references relating to the Neuropterida, which resulted in the addition of >1000 new citations to the Bibliography. Those additions significantly increased the depth and breadth of Bibliography coverage in a number of areas, particularly the global use of lacewings in economic entomology and references that contain relatively minor neuropterid content but which are critical for understanding what is known about the breadth of neuropterid insect interactions with other living species.

Undergraduate Students

Many undergraduate student workers have provided various kinds of assistance on the Bibliography project over the years. Perhaps the most significant of these contributions was made by a long line of students who, from 2004 to 2018, carefully produced, checked and processed the majority of the PDF files now linked to the Bibliography; those files were produced mostly during the period before PDFs of the historical entomological literature became more widely available and accessible. Other students have been involved in securing copies of papers for verification of bibliographic data, building the digital library of the Bibliography from a wide variety of disparate sources, and managing and organizing the physical literature collection that still partially underlays the Bibliography. For each of their separate contributions to the Bibliography I would like to thank the following students (listed alphabetically; current students are asterisked [*]): Sadie Arguello, Sarah Bailey, Lauren Bersano, David Chaszar, Lisa Doty, John Dumont, Chyla Evert, Victoria Fielding, Sukhtej Gill, Ritisha Gupta, Shawn Hanrahan, Kevin Henson, Akash Krisna, Franklin Leung, Wilson Lu, John McLemore, Diego Menses, Landon Proctor, Bethany Reyes, Allision Rocha, Chase Smolik, Alex Strawn, and Jessi Sutton.

Libraries and Librarians

A special debt of gratitude is due the many librarians who have assisted me over the period of many years with the bibliographic research that is incorporated in the Bibliography. As a graduate student, postdoc and faculty member, respectively, I have made particularly significant use of the resources, facilities and services of the libraries of Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution (especially the National Museum of Natural History) and Texas A&M University. Wolfgang Brunnbauer kindly provided access to a number of old and rare works contained in the library of the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien in 2005. The dedicated individuals associated with the libraries of these institutions in particular, but also the staffs of many other libraries in the United States and Europe that I have visited, have provided me with uniformly courteous and helpful services and with access to the collections under their care. As access to scientific literature resources becomes increasingly digital, it is unfortunate that the process of obtaining that information is also becoming increasingly faceless. It is all too easy to overlook the people who stand behind the new and old library services that we use. We must not forget the importance of libraries and the librarians that guide and nurture those resources.

Carolina Deleon and Zheng Ye 'Lan' Yang of the Texas A&M University Libraries have provided space for and oversight of the student workers who, over the course of many years, have produced most of the PDF files of scanned neuropterid literature that are linked to the Bibliography.

Cooperating Organizations

Many organizations from around the world have granted permissions that allow the Bibliography to make available as digital copies selected works that they have published. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the substantive cooperation that these organizations have provided in granting such permissions. A list of cooperating societies, institutions and publishers can be found on the Cooperating Organizations page, together with links to their respective web sites (where available).

Graphics

Some of the icons used in the Bibliography were designed by Yusuke Kamiyamane and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Funding

Versions 9.0 through 11.0 of the Bibliography were supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) program Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET), grant #0933588.

Versions 7.04 to 8.00 of the Bibliography were supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation through Division of Environmental Biology, Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories grant #0416206. Support from this source facilitated the production of a large number PDF files that comprise a substantial portion of the primary and secondary taxonomic literature on the Neuropterida of the world. The substantive support provided under this grant allowed the Bibliography to expand from its initial emphasis on bibliographic citations into a significant digital library that provides open access to a large body of scientific literature relevant to the global neuropterological research community.

Versions 6.x of the Bibliography were supported in part by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board through Advanced Research Program grant #999902-139. Host support for these versions was provided by the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, a unit of the Texas A&M University Department of Computer Sciences. 

In-kind support for the Bibliography project has been provided over the years by the Department of Entomology of Texas A&M University, Texas A&M AgriLife Research (formerly the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station), and the Texas A&M University Libraries.