<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small">Thank you to everyone participating in this interesting discussion. I'm at least relieved to know that there is no community standard, yet, and so I'm not off kilter having developed my own solution. As I understand it, palaeontologists assign separate unique identifiers to the different fossil specimens in/on a single object (?). And Specify seeks a solution to disambiguate "Containers" from specimens.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small">But unique identifiers referring to museum objects or specimens are not "dumb" in the same way that they are for localities, collection events, taxa, etc. They refer to physical objects located in a collection that bear a label with that unique identifier. That unique identifier is thus part of the object retrieval process for collection users, in addition to being for data retrieval.<br>
</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small">So can we envision a system where the unique identifier for the 77th specimen on a microscope slide can also be used as part of the object retrieval process? Or have we decided that, given a unique identifier for the 77th specimen, I'm better off having to go to the database to reference the museum object's ID before heading into the compactors? Does anyone have a significant objection to the decimal INST-123456.077 to uniquely refer to the 77th specimen in/on museum object INST-123456?</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small">Thanks for the continued discussion!</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small">Colin</div></div>