[Nhcoll-l] Has anyone had experience using Specify as electronic museum management system?

[angie thompson]

Lien,

My lab has used Specify database for years. I love it. Everything is
*finally* in one database - there's a table for scanning and attaching
accession paperwork and permits, a table for publications so you can easily
link specimens to their citation history, all of our loans are 'in' and we
can quickly find who is coming due. Use of authority tables and 'trees'
that tie to lookup fields cuts down on misspellings, and helps keep
mistakes down to a mild roar (our original database has issues with people
putting data into the wrong field, such as in the taxon field, they would
put 'Jurassic').

It's a complex thing but it's worth it. We make extensive use of wikis to
train people, as well as to provide them with a quick reference. (wikis
[dot] utexas [dot] edu/display/specify6/Specify+Database)

Finding the information you need is really quick, too. It's been a learning
curve, of course, but we can now generate reports that count number of
specimens per locality, how many research loans vs. outreach loans for any
given year, and so on. It's nice having good tools to look at the
collections with, but it's also a great help for gathering statistical data
about how the collection is *used*.

I find one of the biggest drawbacks is how hard it is to change information
once it's in the database. If data got added incorrectly, or even if you
just want to refine some information, in many cases each record has to be
edited individually. An example would be if a taxa is split, with some
saying with the original genus but others getting reassigned. In this case,
you would have to first update the taxon 'tree', then open *only* the
records that are getting reassigned and edit each of them. Sure, it's a
small thing, but if you have a lot to do then it gets really tedious and
time consuming. The silver lining is if *all* the specimens get reassigned,
you just edit the 'tree' and the individual records tied to that entry all
change (this features comes with its own dangers, though!).

Hope this helps. Feel free to contact me if you have other questions.

Angie

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 6:37 AM, Huong Lien Tran <huong.tran at uq.net.au>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> I am posting for my colleague who is working in natural history collection
> management. Currently her museum in Vietnam is looking to digitise their
> current specimens collections and is looking for an affordable management
> system. We've done some research and found that the common ones like KEmu
> or Vernon are a bit too expensive for their museum to handle. We've come
> upon Specify (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__specifyx.specifysoftware.org_specify7_&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=InDsYKRaBducE-o3tDKHCN6uuQ0o7Lm03va1z7qaUrM&s=HI7xEF19TJNrx5S6GJap8u-oro_8dmJyrNXJhL5-zis&e= ) and it seems
> to be very good in the prospect of having local technicians handling the
> development and maintenance the database, keeping the cost at affordable
> level. Nevertheless, we would really want to have some insights from
> professionals who had experience with Specify. Are there any pitfalls we
> should look for? Or maybe a contact points where we can get help when using
> Specify?
>
>
> Thanks You,
>
>
> Lien
>
>
>
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