Digital versions of taxonomic literature are increasingly readily available, but significant work remains to make this literature fully accessible to users and delivered in a manner best fitting their needs. As part of the INOTAXA project, we conducted interviews with a wide range of potential users and developed a collection of use cases that may guide the development of systems to provide access to the taxonomic literature. The use cases span the range from those closest to the originators of taxonomic literature (systematists gathering material for taxonomic revision, often including phylogenetic analysis) to those that will extend the impact of the literature (e.g. ecologists harvesting species associations for modelling of interactions). They fall into eight broad categories: 1. general exploration of source material; 2. taxonomy (e.g. preparing revisions and checklists, conducting phylogenetic analyses); 3. specialized taxonomy-related (e.g., preparing author catalogues, itineraries or histories of expeditions); 4. identification (e.g., identifying specimens for taxonomic, pest control, surveys, or other purposes); 5. extra-taxonomy (e.g., harvesting data for ecological, morphological, or character evolution studies); 6. policy decision-making; 7. data maintenance (e.g., correcting information in databases); and 8. web services.

While there are many common functions required by these use cases, for example, searching and browsing by taxonomic name or geographic location, sequences of tasks and desired results often differ. Some use cases, particularly those beyond more traditional taxonomy, involve users who are interested only in specific parts of the literature. As they are likely to be less familiar with taxonomic literature and how to search for their exact needs, they may require more support for browsing or in assessing data completeness and fitness for use. It will be a challenge to design schemas and interfaces which support multiple use cases well without overwhelming users. The practices of many users are currently constrained by print formats. Future systems can be freed from these constraints and support database-oriented rather than document-oriented uses of literature. Such a perspective will foster closer integration of the literature with other kinds of biodiversity information such as specimen and nomenclatural databases. This will not only allow published biodiversity data to be used much more extensively and in novel ways, it will open the door to more flexible ‘publication’ and delivery of taxonomic information and data in the future.