[Nhcoll-l] collector & determiner identities

[Macklin, James]

Hi David,

Outside of the various flavours of collection management systems there really needs to be a standardized controlled vocabulary of these various "agents" which is maintained and some form of web services available. In botany, we have had at least one publically accessible list of collectors and authors which has been maintained and curated for decades, the Harvard University Herbaria Index of Botanists: http://kiki.huh.harvard.edu/databases/botanist_index.html  This list has many of the attributes you mention. The agent fields included are quite comprehensive and include reference to more than the "who" including "what, where, when" See the Carl Linnaeus example here...

http://kiki.huh.harvard.edu/databases/botanist_search.php?mode=details&id=92

You will also note that GUIDs are assigned to each agent. The AppleCore group are recommending this Index as a controlled vocabulary for authors and collectors associated with specimen records (note that this group is actively working on the AppleCore best practice again; new home to be announced soon).

In relation to the social aspects, it could be interesting to use the Harvard Index and map across the networks of collectors as this includes at least some "team-based" collecting information.

In my experience, the first collector listed on the label should be the one associated with the field number. In some cases where teams go in the field and labels are commonly generated, I have seen the other collector's numbers in parentheses beside their names. I think we will recommend this in AppleCore as at least this would be parseable... Of course, institutional or project-based numbers make this association game even more complicated.

Lots of fun in this space :-)

Best,  James

James Macklin, PhD
Research Scientist: Botany and Biodiversity Informatics
Associate Curator, DAO Herbarium
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
________________________________________
From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] on behalf of Shorthouse, David [davidpshorthouse at gmail.com]
Sent: February 18, 2016 9:46 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] collector & determiner identities

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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