[Nhcoll-l] global unique identifiers and naturalhistory collections

Mon Oct 15 15:12:07 EDT 2012

  Doug --- I appreciate (and also groan the teensiest bit) when
reading this lucid description of ALL the challenges we face with such
heterogeneous practices.  I think you have made really nicely clear
just how difficult things are!   Two guid best practices in our blog
post were:  1) GUIDs must be assigned as close to the source as
possible.  For example, if data is collected in the field, the
identifier for that data needs to be assigned in the field and
attached to the field database with ownership initially stated by the
maintainers of that database.  For existing data, assignment can be
made in the source database.  2)   GUIDs propagate downstream to other
systems.  Creating new GUIDs in warehouses that duplicate existing
ones is bad practice, and thus aggregators need to honor well-curated
GUIDs from providers.   That jives with what you are saying, I think.

Please also appreciate that the kind of GUID we are suggesting is a
Digital Object Identifier or DOI.  The DOI website has a great
description of the value of using DOIs.  It says "The DOI system
provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration
and use of persistent interoperable identifiers for use on digital
networks."  Those words resonate with me strongly.  DOIs are opaque
and not tied to terms used in our databases such as collections codes
or catalog numbers.  I continue to be convinced this makes sense.  It
means the DOI is a wrapper around a specimen, or metadata record, or
digital surrogate (e.g. an image of a specimen) that points to those
objects and allows them to be found.  This is just smart, at least in
my opinion.

Best, Rob

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu> wrote:
> The thread sprouted and grew like a weed over the weekend, so I'll
> try to collate things:
>
> Dirk Neumann wrote:
>
>>However, it is crucial that the registration numbers are tied to
>>collections and specimens in the collection, therefore I would rather
>>favour to have the museum acronyms & specimen numbers included in such a
>>code (what would be easily feasible if using a combined alpha numeric &
>>alphabetical coding system). Problem here surely lies with the
>>entomological collections, which can't be individualised in near future,
>>but in the light of ongoing barcoding campaigns one should have in mind
>>that many modern samples (which do have e.g. individual barcodes
>>generated by BOLD) do have unique identifiers as soon as they are
>>processed (this applies also for historic specimens picked form the pin)
>>- even if the analyses fails.
>
> and Mark O'Brien wrote:
>
>>Reading that whole blog entry gave me a headache.  We have had
>>unique museum identifiers for many years, starting with printed
>>lists back in the 1960s.    If you dissociate a museum acronym  from
>>a specimen number, it will cause confusion and perhaps cause more
>>problems.  Let's say that someone uses a specimen from the UMMZ that
>>has a record number UMMZI-0023578.  In the resulting publication, it
>>becomes a part of a type series, and anyone reading that paper would
>>be able to determine (without even having to go online) that it is
>>from the Univ. Michigan Museum of Zoology Insect collection.  If it
>>was coded instead with 081-211118-87650 it means nothing without an
>>intermediary decoding via some online portal.   I know the old KISS
>>(Keep it Simple, Stupid) adage means more now than it ever did,
>>since people have a tendency to make very complex systems because
>>they can.
>
> These two comments relate to something extremely important: GUID
> labels, even those with acronyms like UMMZ, absolutely DO NOT give
> any information about which collection a specimen is from. We have
> specimens in the UCR collection, including holotypes, bearing GUIDs
> with codens such as AMNH, EMEC, USNM, MEI, and so forth - some of
> which were traded to us, some donated to us, and some which always
> were ours, but were simply databased somewhere else (e.g., the AMNH).
> We even have three different codens for our own specimens (UCRC ENT,
> UCR ENT, UCREM), and a multi-instiutional coden (UCIS, for
> "University of California Insect Survey", specimens from which are
> spread throughout several different UC collections), resulting from
> different historical databasing efforts. Conversely, there are over
> 50 insect collections around the world that now contain specimens
> with "UCRC ENT" or "UCR ENT" barcode labels on them, simply because
> those specimens were sent here, given GUIDs and databased here, and
> returned.
>
> The bottom line is that any assigned GUIDs absolutely MUST be treated
> as information-free.  This particular point has, in fact, recently
> caused a rather serious debate within the ICZN, when an author
> recently included a coden-based GUID in a new taxon description but
> did not specify the type repository. Failure to specify a type
> depository is, after 1999, grounds for a name being unavailable, and
> some Commissioners were apparently unaware that GUIDs did not always
> correlate to where a specimen was deposited. They do not, thus there
> is controversy as to whether such a description is valid under the
> Code.
>
> I will note that Dave Furth already posted the "official" list of
> entomological collection codens, so the entomological community is
> *trying* to use a standard, though there are some conflicts and
> omissions relative to other sources (e.g., DiscoverLife). To continue
> in that vein:
>
> Bill Poly wrote:
>
>>Expanding on what Mark just wrote, standardization of institutional
>>codes for museums has been going on for decades:
>>
>>1) http://www.biodiversitycollectionindex.org/static/index.html
>>
>>2) Leviton, A.E., R.H. Gibbs, Jr., E. Heal, and C.E. Dawson.  1985.
>>Standards in herpetology and ichthyology: Part I.  Standard symbolic
>>codes for institutional resource collections in herpetology and
>>ichthyology.  Copeia 1985(3): 802-832.
>>
>>3) Leviton, A.E. and R.H. Gibbs, Jr.  1988.  Standards in
>>herpetology and ichthyology. Standard symbolic codes for institution
>>resource collections in herpetology and ichthyology. Supplement No.
>>1: additions and corrections.  Copeia 1988(1): 280-282.
>>
>>4) http://www.asih.org/codons.pdf
>>
>>These acronyms and associated catalog numbers are used widely in the
>>literature.  What is the need for a new system that is "global?"
>
> and John Reiss wrote:
>
>>It would seem that a solution would be to develop a unique numeric
>>collection code that would go along with (rather than replace) the
>>traditional alphabetic one.  Thus a specimen might be something like:
>>
>>13429 AAU 001 for Addis Addaba University specimen 001
>>
>>and
>>
>>11946 AAU 001 for Aarhus University specimen 001
>
> The problem here is that we DO need a *global* registry of
> institutional codens, because you will never, ever, get people to
> RELABEL specimens that they have already labeled; do you think that
> the people in Aarhus, whose specimen AAU 001 looks fine to them, are
> going to remove that label and replace it with a label that says
> "11946 AAU 001"? Are you going to pay them for the labor that this
> would require? Can you track down all the AAU labels on specimens
> they have sent to other institutions, and replace those, too? There
> will, inevitably, be cases where there are genuinely non-unique GUIDs
> and you can bet the owners of the specimens in question will not
> budge about changing their labels OR their digital records. There may
> not BE a solution for this once it has occurred, but at least with a
> single authoritative registry of codens we can *prevent* as much of
> these conflicts as possible.
>
> Rob Guralnick wrote:
>
>>Finally, I keep thinking about how much we scan barcodes all the time
>>and don't care at all about the numbers in those barcodes that get us
>>onto airplanes, or that get us groceries.   Between sticking guids in
>>QR codes or cutting and pasting them and resolving their contents to a
>>record, does anyone _ever_ really transcribe an identifier number for
>>number?  Maybe its me, but I just can't see this issue about error
>>correction being relevant.  What am I missing?
>
> What you are missing is that lots of institutions are using, or have
> used, GUIDs that are not barcoded. The UCIS GUIDs developed and
> employed by Peter Kevan and Ev Schlinger in the 1970s were
> batch-printed by a computer program running a ribbon printer. That's
> over 300,000 specimens, in at least 5 major collections, with GUID
> labels that have no barcodes - are you going to insist that all of
> the UC collections containing these specimens remove those GUIDs and
> replace them with new ones with barcodes?
>
> That aside, this example points to another ugly problem - when one
> specimen has either multiple GUIDs or multiple different records
> under the same GUID. That is, some of the UC collections have in fact
> ignored the UCIS GUID labels and attached new GUID labels to those
> specimens - and in at least a few cases, those original GUIDs had
> actually been databased and put online. The result is that you can
> have one specimen for which there are two different online GUIDs -
> plus the associated duplicated data. Also, many institutions have
> databasing initiatives which make use of specimens borrowed from
> *other* institutions, and sometimes they have work-study students
> doing this, who simply add a new GUID and database it even if a
> specimen already has one ("otherwise how are the data supposed to get
> into our database?") - which results in the same problem of multiple
> GUIDs for one specimen. But even cases where the students are told to
> use pre-existing GUIDs are problematic, when those students are told
> to enter the data. Why is that a problem? Because commonly the source
> institution has already entered the data for that same specimen in
> their own database! The odds that two people in different places
> transcribing the same label will produce *absolutely identical*
> database records is nearly zero, if only because it is exceedingly
> rare for two institutions to use the exact same databasing software
> (same fields, same menu options, etc.), plus the possibility that one
> or the other data entry person might make a typo or omission that
> results in non-identicality. If one then looks online and sees two
> different sets of data under the same GUID, how does one decide
> *which* set to trust?
>
> My point is that even a GUID that is perfect in every way (even if it
> has a barcode, and an embedded DOI or whatever) can still be defeated
> by the simple fact that people who are databasing specimens rarely
> (if ever) implement the policy to NEVER enter data for a specimen
> that has come from another institution and has a GUID on it, and
> instead to (1) request a data file from the loaning institution, and
> (2) only *use* that data file, rather than *exporting* its contents
> into their own database (which typically entails converting it into a
> different format). GUIDs do not solve all of the problems, because
> some problems are related to how people do things. As Robert Heinlein
> said, "It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are
> so ingenious." (ironically, this quote itself is a pseudo-duplicate,
> as at least four famous authors have said something nearly identical
> - including Edward Teller, Douglas Adams, and Gene Brown - on top of
> much older but anonymous quotes).
>
> Sincerely,
> --
>
> Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
> Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
> phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
>               http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
>    "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
>          is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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