[Nhcoll-l] Jar Numbering Systems

[Monaghan, Nigel]

Emily

We spent the last 8 years doing an inventory level catalogue across our museum and didn’t have the resources for individual specimen entries in our database for our spirit collections or for our insect collections. We used a numbering system for ‘containers’ that in our collections may be a jar with multiple tubes, or a box with multiple insects. Numbers in a simple run of integers across all taxa (a jar may contain a mix of taxa) have a prefix referring to major collection category:

NC:zool.jar.1 = Natural History Division, Container : zoology . glass jar . number 1

If we refer to a single tube with its own museum register number, we use the above container code as a storage location, rather than as the unique identifier for the database record. It has allowed us to manage 26,000 jars and only when we get a loan request for a single specimen do we create a detailed database record for that specimen. We do not list strings of register numbers on the outside of our jars. Some jars have number lists in the alcohol. The main place for detailed lists is in the database.

Nigel


Mr Nigel T. Monaghan,
Keeper,
Natural History Division,
National Museum of Ireland – Natural History,
Merrion Street,
Dublin D02 F627,
IRELAND

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From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Emily M. Braker
Sent: 01 August 2017 17:24
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] Jar Numbering Systems

Hi All,

We are planning to rehouse and inventory our Herpetology collection which will include implementing a container-level specimen tracking system. All catalog numbers in a jar will be linked to a unique container ID to increase findability, especially for large taxonomic series that span multiple jars within a given geographic region.

I am interested to know what other collections have done regarding a jar numbering systems (sequential? sequential within taxon? other?). Or, if you use barcodes for tracking containers, have you encountered issues with scanning through glass? We will be adding thermal labels to each jar to replace our existing external jar tag that lists species and locality (county-level resolution). Along these lines, does anyone go so far as listing the catalog numbers of specimens stored within the same jar on their thermal labels? We are hoping to streamline the process of searching through multiple jars and hundreds of specimens to find the distinguished few that are requested to go on loan. I’d welcome any suggestions or advice.

Thanks!
Emily

Emily Braker
Vertebrate Collections Manager, Zoology Section
University of Colorado Museum of Natural History
265 UCB, Bruce Curtis Building
Boulder, CO 80309-0218
Phone: 303-492-8466



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