[Nhcoll-l] Taxonomic vs. catalog-number arrangements

[Douglas Yanega]

For different sorts of collections, different approaches can be more or 
less efficient. In our insect collection, with >4 millions specimens, 
out of which around 560,000 have GUID labels, tracking using database 
numbers is not only going to fail for 85% of the collection, but the 
physical organization of unit trays in drawers in cabinets makes 
retrieval very straightforward if you know a taxon name. There is always 
space to add new taxa in appropriate locations, and changes in 
classification - which are fairly common - are almost never 
significantly disruptive. Shifting unit trays or drawers around is 
typically a task that takes a few minutes, rarely more, and *not* having 
to track, in a database, where things are moved to or from actually 
saves a lot of time. Specimens mounted on microscope slides and stored 
in boxes are easy to navigate without digitized links to their physical 
locations, as long as the boxes are labeled and organized sensibly. 
Herbaria, with manila folders and herbarium sheets, also function pretty 
well when just organized taxonomically.

On the other hand, our spider collection was organized by a previous 
curator into thousands of small vials within hundreds of larger jars, on 
shelves, each jar containing a single family. It is easy to find where a 
family is, but if it's a family that occupies more than one jar, and you 
want a certain genus or species, it becomes increasingly hopeless as the 
number of jars of that family increases. If we ever were to try to 
database the spider collection, it would probably involve putting a GUID 
on each jar lid, and recording which vials are in which jars. The 
majority of vials in a jar will not have their GUIDs visible, however, 
and only the jars in the front of each shelf will have their GUIDs 
visible, so even that system is still problematic, though better than 
guesswork. Those of us who deal with things in jars and vials and 
shelves do, I think, face very different challenges from those who do not.

The point is that some of this depends on the nature of the storage 
system, which seems to be central to this particular discussion thread, 
but a *lot* depends on the scaling. If every single specimen-containing 
unit in your collection is databased, that is a luxury that many of us 
will never have. It's taken us 25 years to get 560,000 units databased 
(the unit in this case being an insect pin, sometimes a slide), and 
that's around 15% of our collection. Considering that we have no 
external funding to do the bulk of this, that we are averaging over 
20,000 specimens databased a year is pretty remarkable, but it's still a 
drop in the proverbial bucket. Relying upon a database to track 
specimens is not practical under these circumstances. Bear in mind also 
that in arthropods, any collection that has around 75-80% of their 
specimens identified to genus or species is doing exceptionally well; in 
most collections the percentage is lower than that, so fine-scale 
tracking is not as valuable. If you want to know where to find 
unidentified specimens of family X, all you need to know is where family 
X is located (assuming those specimens are all in one place, as is the 
case with taxonomically-arranged collections). In some families, there 
can be 50,000 unidentified specimens, and at that scale it's not worth 
the effort required to track each one individually, and it would be 
utterly impossible to show a visiting researcher all 50,000 specimens if 
they were scattered at random in the collection and you had to locate 
them one at a time using a locator database. If your unidentified 
material of family X never exceeds, say, 20 specimens (or 
specimen-containing units), then sure, extracting 20 of them from random 
locations in your collection might not seem like so terrible a chore.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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