When Kristin Nowell and Peter Jackson compiled the Cat Action Plan, they collected a huge amount of information on all aspects of wild cats, such as taxonomy, biology, ecology, distribution, conservation and management. Many of these documents belong to the grey literature: Irreplaceable copies of bulky reports, short notes, hand-drawn distribution maps and tables with unique records, never properly published, but nevertheless important pieces of knowledge for applied cat conservation. This broad collection of often barely readable copies up to glossy paper reprints forms the basis of the Digital Cat Library. In 2001, when Peter Jackson retired as the chair of the Cat Specialist Group, we inherited his unique cat library and started to scan the papers, notes, pamphlets, reprints, and reports - basically everything but the books. The idea was to save storage room, but even more to open the library to all members and friends of the Cat Specialist Group.

The World Wide Web is an excellent instrument to offer this service to our members and friends anywhere on the globe. However, some of the PDFs are big, and some of you who are accessing the library through a slow modem will find it difficult, expensive or even impossible to download such files. We are aware of this - but we cannot change it at present. Most of the PDFs were created from scans of photocopies, and the quality of many of the original documents did not allow for a low resolution. Our restricted capacity does furthermore not allow turning the bitmap scans into much smaller and searchable text PDFs. Some of the larger works are broken down into several files. We receive new documents more and more as digital text files, which can be transferred into much smaller PDFs.

You can download one copy of any of the PDFs from the folders of the Digital Cat Library for your personal use. To read the documents on the screen or to print them, you need Adobe's Acrobat® Reader or a text program able to read Portable Document Format files (PDFs). To make full use of the Digital Cat Library, we recommend that you download any of the reference databases from our website and integrate it into your own reference system. We use Reference Manager 10 by ISI ResearchSoft to manage the library, but you can also download the RIS and import it into any other bibliography software.

Please integrate your papers into the Digital Cat Library! Send digital versions (preferably text PDFs) to ch.breitenmoser(at)kora.ch or a reprint of your work to:

We accept papers in most languages, provided that they come with an English title and abstract. We are looking for published scientific papers, but also for reports, theses, and unpublished work if they are relevant to cat conservation. We welcome especially the submission of Action Plans and Conservation Strategies! By sending us a document, you give us the right to integrate it into the Digital Cat Library and to distribute personal copies of your paper to any user of the library.

The IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group is not responsible for the content of the documents in the Digital Cat Library nor do we make a judgement of the scientific quality of a work through its integration into the library.

We would like to thank the following for financial support: Carl Mayer Foundation, Conservation International, CAT (Cat Action Treasury), Bosack and Kruger Foundation, Charlie Knowles of the Wildlife Conservation Network, the Conservation Division of the Forestry Bureau Taiwan and Panthera.

The following people have helped to build the Digital Cat Library by donating their libraries or scanning documents and building the database: Peter Jackson, Kristin Nowell, Seraina Klopfstein, Sarah Althaus, Stefanie Geiser, Eliane Schmid, Karin Sonderegger, Marlis Hofstetter and Sama Fuimaono. Guillaume Chapron made the programming of the new searchable library.

To complete, expand and maintain this new and more efficient version, we need additional funding. If you feel that you would like to support the Digital Cat Library, please contact the co-chairs of the Cat Specialist Group.

Urs and Christine Breitenmoser
u.breitenmoser(at)vetsuisse.unibe.ch
ch.breitenmoser(at)kora.ch