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

[Chuck Miller]

Dirk,
There's a start on a unique museum identifier repository at the Global Registry of Biological Repositories (GRBio) at www.grbio.org<http://www.grbio.org/>.  But it is currently focused on biological/biodiversity collections.

Chuck

Chuck Miller | VP-IT & CIO | Missouri Botanical Garden
4344 Shaw Boulevard | Saint Louis, MO 63110 | Phone 314-577-9419

From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Dirk Neumann
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2014 4:03 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Unique IDs for museum objects versus specimens

Hi all,

don't want to add lengthy comments, so just briefly:

The entering into force of the Nagoya Protocol stipulates specific reporting requirements, for those collections based in countries that ratified the NP. Among other, unique identifiers allowing tracing and origin of genetic resources should be applied soon. Application of unique identifiers will be part of and further detailed in the reporting obligations of respective countries.

To confirm previous comments: yes, we do need a flexible system that allows application of unique identifiers  to identify batch samples, unsorted materials, etc. and unique should not be confused with identifiers for individual specimens (as some political decision makers did during discussions towards the European ABS-legislation).

Unique identifiers should be unique - many molecular barcoding / digitalisation projects apply various kinds of barcodes, without testing if these are really unique (a high probability rate that barcodes would surely be not duplicated is not sufficient in this context).

Any barcode or decimal numbering is not unique, because "123456.077" might appear as number in various collections or museums, may perfectly translates into other types of numberings (e.g. telephone / insurance / account numbers), and even adding an abbreviation for the institute , e.g. INST-123456.077 might
a) not result in a be unique ID inside this museum, e.g. if various collections / sections inside this museum use a similar numbering system, e.g. compinations of accession dates & specimen numbers, as John suggested (2014.11.3)
b) not be unique globally for natural history specimens, unless we do have a obligatory list of Museum abbreviations that excludes any duplications

Similar applies e.g. for GenBank numbers; GenBank numbering might be unique inside GenBank, but the encoding does not allow to decipher in which collection the corresponding specimen is deposited.

This adds an second field that should be considered in this discussion, how can we link unique identifiers with unique museum references. We need a kind of master ID, especially for the tissue and DNA collections and publication of samples stored in these collections.

Sadly, this receives limited attention at the moment, even though many barcoding & digitisation projects outbid each other to gather & publish specimen data. I would appreciate if we could enter a active discussion how to deal with this.

All the best
Dirk




Am 14.08.2014 22:55, schrieb 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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