FishTechDB - A Bibliography for Fish Technology

FishTechDB is a bibliographical database of topics related to fish technology.  Mr. Peter Howgate who worked at Torry Research Station and was Head of the Quality Studies Section when he retired in December 1989 has generously donated his time and efforts in creating and making this database available as a public service to the global seafood community via this web site. 

The database "Fish Technology" is intended to cover practices for the post harvest handling and processing of all types of animal products obtained from the aquatic environment (in the usual convention; not including mammalian species), and associated aspects such as, measurement of quality, quality control and quality assurance, and public health aspects.

The bibliography is not intended to cover the basic sciences of biology, microbiology, chemistry, biochemistry, physics and engineering associated with fish technology. The bibliography is based on that compiled by the library of Torry Research Station, Aberdeen, UK, between 1984 to 1994, and called TORLIB. The Station was closed in 1994 and the remnants of its duties transferred to other government departments. TORLIB was not further maintained, but the bulk of the references, about 38 000 entries, were put in the oneFish site, http://www.onefish.org/global/index.jsp, where it can be searched. That version of TORLIB contains a high proportion of references not within the domain of what is defined as 'fish technology' above, predominately references to basic sciences and to aspects of food science other than fishery products.

A few years ago Peter obtained a copy of TORLIB in a form usable on a PC and converted the contents to a Microsoft Excel file.  He scanned the database and selected references which he considered were relevant to fish technology; about 8 000 entries.  He edited the references and formatted the authors names in a uniform style, expanded abbreviated journal names to full listings, added abstracts when he could find them, (the originals mostly had keywords), and generally edited titles and corrected typing errors.  He added references from his own collection, which has expanded the time span of the coverage of the database, so that the database now - November 2008 - contains just over 9, 000 entries.  Seafood Network Information Center (SeafoodNIC) hosts the database.

The database is available in Microsoft Excel format which provides a limited set of facilities for sorting and selecting entries.  Persons wanting more extensive facilities will need to move it to a general purpose database or to a specialized bibliographic database. The columns in the Excel table are:

Author - the name(s) of the author(s) of the article

Title - the title of the article

Reference - the bibliographic reference for the article

Year - the year of publication

Abstract - summary of the article

Excel provides some simple search facilities from "Find" in the edit menu to "AutoFilter" and "Advanced Filter" in the Data menu, but Excel files should be transferrable to true database programs or to specialized bibliography programs for those who might have such software.

Peter has generously offered to maintain the database and is willing to receive:

• relevant references that could be added,
• edits and corrections, and
• text for abstracts which are presently missing.

Periodically Peter will provide an updated version of the file which will be posted on this website (see below).  Your contribution can be submitted to Peter in plain text, or as an Excel file that follows the database format (Author; Title; Reference; Year; and Abstract) for editing and inclusion in a future version of the file.

Contact Peter Howgate at: PHowgate@clara.co.uk

Download the FishTechDB via:  Excel 2003 (11 MB)

Submit abstracts (one at a time) for future versions of the database.