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<p>For different sorts of collections, different approaches can be
more or less efficient. In our insect collection, with >4
millions specimens, out of which around 560,000 have GUID labels,
tracking using database numbers is not only going to fail for 85%
of the collection, but the physical organization of unit trays in
drawers in cabinets makes retrieval very straightforward if you
know a taxon name. There is always space to add new taxa in
appropriate locations, and changes in classification - which are
fairly common - are almost never significantly disruptive.
Shifting unit trays or drawers around is typically a task that
takes a few minutes, rarely more, and <b>not</b> having to track,
in a database, where things are moved to or from actually saves a
lot of time. Specimens mounted on microscope slides and stored in
boxes are easy to navigate without digitized links to their
physical locations, as long as the boxes are labeled and organized
sensibly. Herbaria, with manila folders and herbarium sheets, also
function pretty well when just organized taxonomically.<br>
</p>
<p>On the other hand, our spider collection was organized by a
previous curator into thousands of small vials within hundreds of
larger jars, on shelves, each jar containing a single family. It
is easy to find where a family is, but if it's a family that
occupies more than one jar, and you want a certain genus or
species, it becomes increasingly hopeless as the number of jars of
that family increases. If we ever were to try to database the
spider collection, it would probably involve putting a GUID on
each jar lid, and recording which vials are in which jars. The
majority of vials in a jar will not have their GUIDs visible,
however, and only the jars in the front of each shelf will have
their GUIDs visible, so even that system is still problematic,
though better than guesswork. Those of us who deal with things in
jars and vials and shelves do, I think, face very different
challenges from those who do not.</p>
<p>The point is that some of this depends on the nature of the
storage system, which seems to be central to this particular
discussion thread, but a <b>lot</b> depends on the scaling. If
every single specimen-containing unit in your collection is
databased, that is a luxury that many of us will never have. It's
taken us 25 years to get 560,000 units databased (the unit in this
case being an insect pin, sometimes a slide), and that's around
15% of our collection. Considering that we have no external
funding to do the bulk of this, that we are averaging over 20,000
specimens databased a year is pretty remarkable, but it's still a
drop in the proverbial bucket. Relying upon a database to track
specimens is not practical under these circumstances. Bear in mind
also that in arthropods, any collection that has around 75-80% of
their specimens identified to genus or species is doing
exceptionally well; in most collections the percentage is lower
than that, so fine-scale tracking is not as valuable. If you want
to know where to find unidentified specimens of family X, all you
need to know is where family X is located (assuming those
specimens are all in one place, as is the case with
taxonomically-arranged collections). In some families, there can
be 50,000 unidentified specimens, and at that scale it's not worth
the effort required to track each one individually, and it would
be utterly impossible to show a visiting researcher all 50,000
specimens if they were scattered at random in the collection and
you had to locate them one at a time using a locator database. If
your unidentified material of family X never exceeds, say, 20
specimens (or specimen-containing units), then sure, extracting 20
of them from random locations in your collection might not seem
like so terrible a chore.</p>
<p>Peace,<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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)
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html">https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
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