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

[Doug Yanega]

It's interesting reading the comments on this thread. I've watched over 
the years as various programs have come onto the specimen-management 
scene, and to me the most remarkable thing is that none of them, 
generation after generation, ever solves all of the problems that were 
identified by users of OTHER older or contemporaneous programs. I 
settled on using FileMaker back around 1993, and have never regretted 
that decision, but it's still - after all this time - got its own 
annoying quirks. From what I can see it does essentially everything 
Specify does plus a few things it doesn't (including the kind of editing 
that Angie wishes she had), and allows for an amazing amount of personal 
customization (especially regarding scripting of automated tasks), but 
still has shortcomings that are bafflingly idiosyncratic. It has no 
built-in "undo" function, for example (everything is instantly 
auto-saved so if you accidentally overwrite or delete part or all of an 
existing record, it's changed forever - you need an external backup copy 
as an insurance policy), and if you want it to count "unique 
occurrences" (say, a list of counties species X is reported from, or a 
list of those species in family Y that have records in the database), 
there is no built-in function to do it - you have to write a script, and 
customize it for each such query. In the case of a huge commercial 
product like FileMaker, you would think that omissions of such 
fundamental database procedures would have generated negative user 
feedback over the last 30 years, and gotten fixed (FM is up to version 
14 now, but goes back to 1985), but apparently not - which is why I use 
the term "baffling". Maybe some day someone will come up with a single 
program that actually is "quirk-free", but I'm not holding my breath. ;-)

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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