[Nhcoll-l] Unique IDs for museum objects versus specimens

[Dean Pentcheff]

This is an issue that I've raised in the past with the Specify team (and
plan to raise again in the near future — fair warning, guys :)

The precipitating example for us comes from marine specimens. Often an
unsorted jar of material will arrive (e.g. from a dredge sample) to be
cataloged in the collection — this unsorted lot should get a unique ID — it
may be around for years before it's touched. Then we may pull out (for
example) all the crustacea into another jar. This partly-sorted lot also
needs a unique ID (it may go to a different room under different staff, so
just keeping it with the original jar is not an option). Then we may pull
out a single individual, identify it, and use that in a publication, so
that, too, needs an ID. A visiting researcher then examines that individual
and pulls off parasitic crustacea, identifying each and putting them into
individual vials, each of which needs an ID. Etc.

What we have is a clear hierarchical branching parent-child relationship
from the initial unsorted lot down to the individual parasites (and their
parasites, and their molecular derivatives, etc.). Logically, the way to
accommodate this is to have any "thing" in the collection identified with a
unique ID. Any derived or subsorted "thing" gets another unique ID and (and
this is critical) is linked to its parent so that all the information from
the parent (and on up the chain to the top) is immediately available via
any "child" ID.

Every "thing" gets a first-class ID (no sub-IDs or a limited list of
"preps" from an initial object). Key to the concept is retaining the
parent-child-grandchild-... chain. At any moment, one should be able to
retrieve any ID's entire chain of parents (and their associated data), or
any ID's entire chain of derived children (and their associated data).

It is a mystery to me why this scheme is not the standard model for
 specimen databases where there is a habit of creating chains of
derivatives over time. There certainly are implementation details that need
careful consideration (for example with propagation of data down the chain,
how "locked" that propagation is, and how to handle things that get
completely subdivided so they no longer exist as such, but whose data must
persist), but it seems like a very clean, very flexible base model.

-Dean
-- 
Dean Pentcheff
pentcheff at gmail.com
dpentche at nhm.org


On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Colin Favret <ColinFavret at aphidnet.org>
wrote:

> Has anyone dealt with the distinction between issuing unique IDs (for
> labels and database records) for museum objects versus specimens? A case in
> point might be a microscope slide with 100 specimens on it (or a jar,
> envelope, etc.). These specimens can be of multiple taxa, different sexes,
> life stages, etc. I believe most collections label the museum object
> (slide, jar, envelope, etc.) with a unique identifier and then treat the
> specimens as a lot, but this doesn't fully parse out the data associated
> with the various specimens in a specimen database.
>
> I've developed my own solution (unique ID label for the object, decimal
> numbers but no label for the individual specimens or specimen lots - e.g.
> INST123456 for the slide, INST123456.001 for the first specimen lot,
> INST123456.002 for the second, etc.).
>
> But I'm wondering what others have done or if there is anything out there
> approaching an industry standard.
>
> Thanks for your input!
>
> Colin
>
> Colin Favret
> Université de Montréal
> Favret.AphidNet.org <http://favret.aphidnet.org/>
>
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