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

[Colin Favret]

Thank you to everyone participating in this interesting discussion. I'm at
least relieved to know that there is no community standard, yet, and so I'm
not off kilter having developed my own solution. As I understand it,
palaeontologists assign separate unique identifiers to the different fossil
specimens in/on a single object (?). And Specify seeks a solution to
disambiguate "Containers" from specimens.

But unique identifiers referring to museum objects or specimens are not
"dumb" in the same way that they are for localities, collection events,
taxa, etc. They refer to physical objects located in a collection that bear
a label with that unique identifier. That unique identifier is thus part of
the object retrieval process for collection users, in addition to being for
data retrieval.

So can we envision a system where the unique identifier for the 77th
specimen on a microscope slide can also be used as part of the object
retrieval process? Or have we decided that, given a unique identifier for
the 77th specimen, I'm better off having to go to the database to reference
the museum object's ID before heading into the compactors? Does anyone have
a significant objection to the decimal INST-123456.077 to uniquely refer to
the 77th specimen in/on museum object INST-123456?

Thanks for the continued discussion!

Colin
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