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

[Colin Favret]

Hi Dean,
     Thanks for clicking send! Your perspective is food for thought. I
admit to not being completely comfortable with my decimal system, hence my
query to the group. On the other hand, I have not been able to think of a
situation where a *fully processed museum object*, one whose database
record is worthy of serving to others and being referenced in a
publication, would be broken down any further than one level in a hierarchy
(museum object > specimen).

Thanks again for everyone's insights! Colin




On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 7:01 PM, Dean Pentcheff <pentcheff at gmail.com> wrote:

> [I have just discovered that I never hit "Send" on this comment. Sorry!]
>
> How significant my objection is would be a matter of opinion...
>
> But here it is. What's outlined there is, in effect, a two-level system.
> There are "first class" specimen IDs (e.g. "INST-123456") and then one
> "derived" level (e.g. "INST-123456.077"). This is analogous to Doug's
> system described earlier.
>
> There are several appealing aspects to that. One is that it's apparent on
> inspection that the ".077" item is directly descended from the "123456"
> item. Cool. Another is that it's easy to gather together all the objects
> that came from "INST-123456" by inspection if they're in front of you,
> intermixed with other objects.
>
> There are some downsides, though. One is that, in situations where there
> can be multiple levels of derivation, we move to the more generalized
> system as outlined by Lena above (e.g. 123456 <- 123456.077 <-
> 123456.077.012 <- 123456.077.012.003 ...). There's an increasing problem of
> length and complexity with this scheme. (This is not academic, by the way,
> we really do have quite a few examples where this many or more levels of
> derivation happen with objects in our collections.)
>
> The particular scheme you propose also has an implicit limit to the number
> of derived objects. The "-077" implies to me that up to 999 items can be
> derived at a single level. Though that's probably fine for nearly every
> case, I think we'd agree that dropping one number and going with "-77" is
> insufficient. So we have a nearly-always-useless "0" floating around with
> every ID.
>
> These are the sorts of concerns that sway me back towards a single,
> numerical, opaque identifier for every "thing" that needs tracking. It's up
> to a data system somewhere to keep track of the relationships (and they can
> also be printed on permanent labels where that is practical).
>
> -Dean
> --
> Dean Pentcheff
> pentcheff at gmail.com
> dpentche at nhm.org
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Colin Favret <ColinFavret at aphidnet.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 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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