Welcome to *tl2.io*, a digital version of **Taxonomic literature : a selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types, ed. 2** (usually abbreviated **TL-2**). [Its homepage](https://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/tl-2/index.cfm) describes TL-2 as follows: > In its print form, TL-2 is a 15 volume guide to the literature of systematic botany published between 1753 and 1940. It is organized by author and includes numbered entries for the author's publications. Suggested abbreviations for use in taxonomic publications are provided: abbreviations for the author's name, short titles and abbreviations of the short titles for publications. TL-2 is the standard by which authors' names and titles should be abbreviated. Seven main volumes of TL-2 were written by F.A. Stafleu and R.S. Cowan with contributions from numerous people, and published between 1976 and 1988. This corpus was expanded with eight large supplements (1992–2009), compiled first by F.A. Stafleu and E.A. Mennega with help of N. Kilian and R. Hand, and later by L.J. Dorr and D.H. Nicolson. See the complete references [[Cite TL-2|here]]. *tl2.io* presents the books' content divided into almost 10000 separate author-pages. Authors whose names start with A–G often have two linked dedicated entries – one from the main volumes and another from the supplements. In such cases the latter entry is marked with "(Suppl.)" in the page title and an opening asterisk (\*) in the text. Each entry includes a link to the respective page in the PDF version at [BHL](https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.48631) as well as several internal supporting links. All authors are linked to [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org) and 85% of them – to [IPNI](https://www.ipni.org/). For these authors, current IPNI [standard form](https://www.ipni.org/about#about-authors) is specified after "Abbreviated name" in the text. This resource is based on an OCR product of TL-2 presented by [Smithsonian Libraries](https://library.si.edu/) and International Association for Plant Taxonomy ([IAPT](https://www.iaptglobal.org/)). The source files were substantially modified, cleaned, converted into markdown format, and enhanced with internal links (see workflow in [[Documentation]]). In the final form, this website is a published online [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) database (aka "vault"). Users of Obsidian can set up this vault locally on their own computers (it will look almost exactly as the website) and enjoy richer tools of a standalone Obsidian application. Importing TL-2 vault is easy; instructions and downloads can be found at [GitHub repository](https://github.com/sav-che/TL-2).