Guide to accessing full text

The Society's policy is to put on the website the full text of all issues of Malimbus five or more years old as well as all issues of the Bulletin of the Nigerian Ornithologists' Society (Bull NOS).  Bull NOS was published from 1964 to 1978.  Malimbus has been published since 1979, when the Nigerian Ornithologists' Society became the West African Ornithological Society and the publication was renamed. 

Volumes 1-34 of Malimbus and all volumes (1-14) of Bull NOS can be consulted on this website.  The full text is available as pdf documents, requiring Adobe Reader on your computer to access them. They can be viewed on the screen, printed and stored. If the page size is too small it can be magnified on the screen by changing the zoom percentage and printed larger by changing the Page Scaling. 

Vols 1-21 and 23-24 of Malimbus, as well as all volumes of Bull NOS, are based on scanned images of pages, but, for Vol 22 and from Vol 25 on of Malimbus, no scanning has been or will be needed as the pdfs are obtained from electronic files in the possession of the Editor. Thanks are due to the owners of the journals that were scanned: Malimbus P.W.P. Browne, Bull NOS vols 11-14 Mary Gartshore, Bull NOS vols 6-10 Roger Wilkinson, Bull NOS vols 1-5 Bob Sharland. You may find some of their personal annotations on the scanned pages! In the indexes for pages, papers and issues, Malimbus references precede Bull NOS references.

Changes in methods of accessing full text. In the past there were three different formats of pdf documents available free from the website: Pages, Papers and Issues. The Papers format gave easy access to papers (generally research articles three or more pages in length). The rest of the contents was accessible through the Pages format, but this did not work well with all browsers so access to contents other than papers could be difficult. Now only a single format of pdf is provided free for all issues five or more years old, and pdfs in this format (explained below) give easy access to the entire contents of each issue. The old "Pages" format has been retained in its entirety but is no longer being updated (i.e., the last volume under this format is Volume 26). "Issues" pdfs have been for some time, and will continue to be available only for sale, as a replacement for "back numbers". 

Pdfs from Malimbus Volumes 1-34 and all volumes of Bull NOS (1964-2012): 1,492 pdfs (Malimbus 1,020 and Bull NOS 472) are available. The new format is a free pdf of any separately identifiable part of the contents. It thus encompasses papers, short notes, errata, corrigenda, editorials, reviews, news, letters, society notices, covers, front matter etc. Each separate part of the contents is listed in a new Table of Contents of each issue, and links to the pdfs are only from these Tables of Contents. The link at the beginning of the present paragraph is to an index page of the new Tables of Contents for Malimbus Volumes 1 to 38 and for all Bull NOS Volumes. Only those for Malimbus Volumes 1-34 and Bull NOS Volumes contain links to pdfs but there are links to summaries of papers for the more recent volumes of Malimbus.  

Note: some pdfs of articles longer than about 8 pages may fail to download when Mozilla Firefox is used as the browser. Tips for correcting this problem are given on the Firefox website. The problem can be avoided by using Internet Explorer as the browser.  

Pages: 4,520 individual pages (Malimbus 3,088 and Bull NOS 1,432) are freely available.  This is almost all the pages in the 40 volumes from 1964 to 2004. Photographs unrelated to adjacent text have been omitted.  Pages can be accessed, one at a time, by typing the volume ID and the page number and then clicking a button. Appropriate volume IDs and page numbers are indicated on the screen in three ways: (1) species index, displaying all the volume IDs and page numbers for some 1,340 species; (2) tables of contents for issues, showing volume IDs and page numbers not only of papers, but of short notes, book reviews, society notices, letters, corrigenda, editorials, etc.;(3) country pages showing volume IDs and page numbers for all references to that particular West African country. 

Issues: no pdfs of issues are available online. However, a pdf of any issue of Malimbus, including issues for the last five years,and of any issue of Bull NOS, can be supplied at a cost of one half of the current year’s subscription.

If you have difficulty accesing a pdf or if you feel that the reproduction of any page is unsatisfactory, please let the Webmaster know.