[NHCOLL-L:679] Re: Specimen databases

[Doug Yanega]

I'll chime in as yet another institution that has both BIOTA and FileMaker
but finds the flexibility and ability to customize the latter (especially
th data input process) to make it superior for my own personal use - though
we eagerly await the next BIOTA version.

Steve Heydon noted:

>(For those museums running on Macintosh systems)

and this is also a consideration - we cannot use anything that is
Windows-only for general purposes. Too many of us have Macs.

Steve also said:

> My only other (minor) complaint with FileMaker is
>that any one field can only have one kind of formatting. So if you want to
>have the genus and species names come out in italics followed by the author
>name in plain text, these two parts cannot be in the same field.

Depends on whether or not you type them in that way. You CAN type text in
multiple formats in a single field, and print it out normally (I regularly
print out locality labels with italicized host plant names), but you CANNOT
hard-format text when moving data. When I got a file of Cerambycid species
from Larry Bezark, he had author and epithet in different fields, and I
have them in a single field - all the records I have therefore are a mix of
italics and non-italics, but I couldn't import Larry's records to make them
combine in such a way that one part was italicized and the other not.


Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
           http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82