Our main goal is to build a on-line Natural History library available to researchers of less favoured countries; this is not, however, the sole aim.
We wish, in particular, both make available old and rare texts, as well as collect and distribute modern works, either unpublished or with permission of the copyright owners.
Shared documents are in ASCII formats (e.g. plain TXT text, HTML...), and images in non-proprietary formats (e.g. JPEG, PNG...); they are zip-compressed, indexed and made avalaible for downloading from our pages.
The site design is quite plain - black text on white background, with no images, frames, tables or forms - to allow surfing to be as easy as possible, even using obsolete computers and browsers.
IF YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE, OR IT IS A WHILE SINCE YOUR LAST VISIT, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY OUR
BioSophia (with uppercase "B" and "S") was founded and registered in 1997. It began to distribute documents via Internet in 2000. At that time, there was only one similar name over the WWW, i.e. "Biosophia Verlag" (uppercase "B" only), a German press house.
Now (2004) we find much more homonyms. "BioSophia" (identical) is a house (BioSophia Products AS, Lillehammer, Norway) producing grain-drops beverages, as well as an interuniversitary research group in Canada. Some more "Biosophia" also appeared.
"www.biosophia.com" is a domain registered by a biological laboratory housed in the Republic of Korea, as well as does exist "www.biosophia.org" and ".net"; "www.biosophia.it" is the official website of IPSO, Istituto di Psicologia Somatica of Milano, Italy; in Japan does exist the "Society of Biosophia Studies"; etc. etc.
We are saying all this just to remark that we have NO connections with any of these organizations.
As a matter of fact BioSophia voluntarily did not register its own domain, because our presence on the WWW is entirely based on webspace presented to us by others. And the way we adopt to thank our hosts is to have our name embedded as a part of their own domain's name.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: WE HAVE MOVED
Since now BioSophia is kindly hosted by www.dodoline.it
This change was absolutely necessary. We, at beginnings, established our website at "members.xoom.it". Later, xoom.it was acquired (or they fused, we don't know the details of this operation) by virgilio.it, so the address became "members.xoom.virgilio.it". Some time later they changed their free-hosting policy, adopting a new one that we frankly dislike. Contemporaneously, they blocked, without any prior notice to us, the FTP access to our website: so presently the site is still active, but we *cannot update* it. Consequently, we looked for another host, and we found DodoLine - a good solution for us, also because we will have no longer annoying advertisements on our pages.
You can read DodoLine's owner reasons for hosting us here.
The transition period will probably be rather messed, and we cannot guarantee that you will be able to find all the files listed by our indexes. We ignore for how long you will find our files on the old hosting webspace, this having been forcedly discontinued by us. They all will be moved to this new address, but this will require some time: the situation will probably normalize around the end of the year. In the meantime, try to locate them on *one the two* alternative URLs we provided in the download indexes.
So:
PLEASE REMOVE YOUR OLD BIOSOPHIA BOOKMARK, IF YOU HAD ONE, AND BOOKMARK THIS PAGE INSTEAD http://www.dodoline.it/biosophia/index.htm
2003 NEWS
Since its foundation, BioSophia has put online mainly material either received from contributors or chosen motu proprio.
We now also invite researchers (with particular regards to *malacologists*, being our sources by far richer in this special field) to submit specifical requests for old (= ante 1900) papers to us.
Given a series of three lucky conditions, i.e.:
- that we have at hand that particular paper
- that it is not too big or too complex to digitalize
- that we have the time to process the request
we shall do of our best to satisfy such desiderata. We anyway shall try to answer, positively or not, to all requests.
This additional service of course is, and will remain, free, as anything here.
This website is progressively enriched as soon as new information is ready.
Thank-you for your interest. (contact us)