[Nhcoll-l] Uploading collection catalogs online

[Doug Yanega]

On 7/11/13 10:20 AM, Ellen Paul wrote:
> And by the way, this is NOT hypothetical.
I was not posing it as a hypothetical. I was suggesting that one needs 
an objective criterion to decide whether a given data point should or 
should not be made public. We have hundreds of specimens of endangered 
species in our collection, but all are either from localities that are 
already well-known to collectors, or from areas where the species has 
long ago been extirpated. As such, we have no reason to clean those data 
before putting them online. If we ever acquire something else for which 
the data are NOT already public, then we might reconsider what to do 
with that particular specimen record. Also, given that a fair bit of our 
specimen data was captured using NSF money, we might be on shaky ground 
if we withheld information from the public.

Sincerely,

-- 
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)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82