[Nhcoll-l] collector & determiner identities

[David Baxter]

Hi David,

At UC/JEPS we use CollectionSpace (CSpace) as our specimen database. In
CSpace, there are separate tables for collectors (i.e. recordedBy) and
determiners (i.e. identifiedBy), as well as nomenclatural authorities and
type assertion authorities. All of these "organizations" tables are related
to a separate "persons" table, which is like the "agents" table you
describe.

Have a table is great, but keeping it up is another thing. We have done
pretty well with keeping our "organizations" linked up to "persons" from
our earliest digitization project to digitize California plant specimens,
but as we've gone further afield it becomes more difficult. You point out
the various complications in maiden and married names, etc., and staff and
digitization students (not to mention OCR in Symbiota) cannot reliably
resolve the ambiguities and record the links in the persons table.

To answer your question, we do not record ORCIDs in our persons table, but
it would make an excellent addition to CSpace and can be done.
Collection-wide it is difficult to keep a perfectly related "persons"
table, but perhaps directed efforts at contemporary "persons of interest"
to determine their output would be feasible and constructive.

And regarding collector name order, at least in plants the first name is
the "main collector", i.e. the person to whom the recordNumber corresponds,
and all subsequent names fall into the same category of "other collectors",
where the order isn't necessarily related to level of contribution

As a side note regarding aggregation at the Consortium of California
Herbaria, back way before the days of ORCIDs, my predecessor kept a
canonical list of California collectors and in the process of aggregation
he munged all collectors into consistent strings. The scope of CCH has
grown so much since then that this is no longer kept up either, but perhaps
with the advent of ORCIDs the existing dormant information could be put to
use again?

David


---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Shorthouse, David <davidpshorthouse at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 6:46 AM
> Subject: [Nhcoll-l] collector & determiner identities
> To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
>
>
> All,
>
> For the past several months, I have been experimenting with the
> reconciliation of collector and determiner names in digitized specimen
> data, using the Canadensys network of aggregated records as a small
> case study.
>
> As you may well know, the Darwin Core terms recordedBy, identifiedBy,
> and indeed scientificNameAuthorship contain people names. To my
> knowledge, no one has tried to reveal the human effort and the
> implicit social networks using content in these terms, perhaps because
> the expected content and format of these terms is so under-specified.
> Maiden and married names, nicknames, variously abbreviated given
> names, etc. are but a few examples that make ad-hoc reconciliation
> heuristics & algorithms very difficult to do well. You can explorer my
> first, albeit naive experiments at
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__collector.shorthouse.net&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=l4-dQ15l7SFEeJeMGIcnWDPyDO7p7IhxNa2gtk34qho&s=mZIjOrs0Vcy44oRHHM8RA14ALH6lG441BSzX1tdtxkI&e=
> .
> There's potential here, but the next logical step is to lift this up
> to something like a Darwin Core extension such that data managers at
> the source have a mechanism to unambiguously link & share each of the
> one-to-many, specimen-to-name pairs to human identity.
>
> I am writing to inquire if anyone knows of any best practices guides
> on how museum staff *ought* to record the names of collectors,
> determiners, and other agents. Do any of you have an *agents* table in
> your database? Have you attempted to link people names in your
> specimen databases to their unambiguous identities and, by extension
> to their scientific outputs like datasets & papers published? Does
> anyone yet record ORCIDs,
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__orcid.org_&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=l4-dQ15l7SFEeJeMGIcnWDPyDO7p7IhxNa2gtk34qho&s=xTk1sgn3JolA6nk4mkV9oxQRdpMuKhWdddwtdnuA8tU&e=
> for this purpose? Last,
> does the ordering of determiner or collector names on labels contain
> any semantic meaning as it does for papers? That's something I have
> not yet considered & quite frankly scares me if this is important.
>
> Hope this generates some discussion,
>
> David P. Shorthouse
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-- 
David Baxter
Biodiversity Informatics Manager
University and Jepson Herbaria
1001 Valley Life Sciences Building
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
(510) 642-2465
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