[Nhcoll-l] global unique identifiers and natural history collections

[Cellinese,Nico]

Dear Mark,

II am really sorry we gave you a headache.  We tried our best to write our blog in a very simplistic way without using tech terms and make it palatable for people like you.  We'll do better next time.

The problems right now is that these acronyms make your IDs unique only within your own institution or locally, but not an a global scale. Yes, someone mentioned that we have tried to standardize them for 10 yrs. How long more do we need to spend on this when in fact we have the technology to overcome the problem and implement a system that would work NOW, not next month, next year, next decade.  IDs do not need to be human readable if they can resolve and expose all data related to your particular records.  Why would you care that DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syr127 implies a paper on primate diversification when in fact, all you need to do is click on the link and recover all the data you want.  An ID doesn't need to provide anything more than a mean to link to a record and expose its data. That is the purpose of a GUID.  Additionally, if I told you that having unique, persistent and resolvable IDs right now would allow you to reason over the relationships that your records at UMICH may have with many others scattered around globally, wouldn't you care to find more about?  If we could track all our collections data and metadata scattered out there and start asking questions about relationships, like ‘please retrieve me all data that EO Wiley collected in Burma in 1975 and are linked to images and tissues samples scattered around the globe, and also give me all that sequences that have been generated from these specimens’  I would want to be able to perform these types of queries over everything that we hold, not just you at UMICH.
This is not about making things harder because ‘we can’. This is about wanting to do more than just linking your own UMICH records in your own database. We have the technology to do much more than being stuck and reason over some inconsistent global acronyms when in fact we have a much better and viable alternative that has been used and tested in related fields.  In my view, our approach is in fact simpler and ‘yes, we can!'

Nico

On Oct 15, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Mark O'Brien wrote:

Reading that whole blog entry gave me a headache.  We have had unique museum identifiers for many years, starting with printed lists back in the 1960s.    If you dissociate a museum acronym  from a specimen number, it will cause confusion and perhaps cause more problems.  Let's say that someone uses a specimen from the UMMZ that has a record number UMMZI-0023578.  In the resulting publication, it becomes a part of a type series, and anyone reading that paper would be able to determine (without even having to go online) that it is from the Univ. Michigan Museum of Zoology Insect collection.  If it was coded instead with 081-211118-87650 it means nothing without an intermediary decoding via some online portal.   I know the old KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) adage means more now than it ever did, since people have a tendency to make very complex systems because they can.
Just my two cents.

Mark

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Robert Guralnick <Robert.Guralnick at colorado.edu<mailto:Robert.Guralnick at colorado.edu>> wrote:
  Dear List --- I have been curious about something, and hope you
won't mind taking a moment to at least cogitate (or perhaps even
respond) with some thoughts.  As digitization efforts continue to ramp
up in collections, there is clearly an impetus to have global unique
identifiers on physical specimens and downstream derivates such as
images, metadata records, etc.   There are a fair number of arguments
about how to do this, and lots of recommendations etc. One could argue
there are TOO MANY recommendations and arguments!

 The key question is:  If there was a service that provided you, free
of charge, with digital object identifiers (DOIs - those global unique
identifiers associated with publications) that could be associated
with your specimens, would you use it?

More details on why I am asking (and what we view as a needed "reset"
on the conversation) can be found in a recent blog post by the
BiSciCol (pronounced "bicycle" and standing for Biological Science
Collections Tracker) group:  http://biscicol.blogspot.com/

Appreciate thoughts!  Will summarize here and on the blog!
Best, Rob

Dr. Rob Guralnick
Curator and Assoc. Prof.
CU Museum of Nat. Hist. and Dept. of Ecol. and Evol. Biol.
University of Colorado, Boulder etc etc etc
https://sites.google.com/site/robgur/
_______________________________________________
Nhcoll-l mailing list
Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l



--
------------------------------------------------------------
Mark F. O'Brien, Collection Manager
Insect Division, Museum of Zoology
The University of Michigan
1109 Geddes Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079
(734)-647-2199
-------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Nhcoll-l mailing list
Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Nico Cellinese, Ph.D.
Assistant Curator, Botany & Informatics
Joint Assistant Professor, Department of Biology

Florida Museum of Natural History
University of Florida
354 Dickinson Hall, PO Box 117800
Gainesville, FL 32611-7800, U.S.A.
Tel. 352-273-1979
Fax 352-846-1861
http://cellinese.blogspot.com/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20121015/f106d87d/attachment-0001.html