[Nhcoll-l] Cataloging unidentified, multi-species Lots

Fri Mar 31 11:52:32 EDT 2023

Sarah,
Echoing what others have said, it definitely does not make sense to hold off on serving data on these collections just because they are not yet identified, the question is simply how best to present them to promote discovery by users who might want to study them.
Currently, we use an assigned field number as the primary identifier for uncatalogued group-samples from a given collecting event. This assigned field number is retained with every lot that is eventually split out from the original container(s). We don’t give a catalogue number to the jar itself, and we don’t attempt to sort lots before entering this information (because it would take as much effort to just identify them, at least for our collection).
The majority of users of our collection are interested in faunal composition over time, and not necessarily in specific taxa, so this arrangement works decently well for us. The only issue we find is that since most collections do not allow searching of material in multiple database tables, it is somewhat confusing for our users and many do not understand that they can search for data this way without us explaining it first.
Best,
Nate

--
[The Ohio State University]
Nathaniel F. Shoobs
Curator of Mollusks
College of Arts & Sciences Dept. of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212
614-688-1342 (Office)
mbd.osu.edu<http://mbd.osu.edu>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Bentley, Andrew Charles <abentley at ku.edu>
Date: Friday, March 31, 2023 at 11:33 AM
To: Callomon,Paul <prc44 at drexel.edu>, Sarah K. Huber <skhuber at vims.edu>, nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Cataloging unidentified, multi-species Lots
Agreed but this could be an iterative process as time, money and human capacity allows. Andy A : A : A : }<(((_°>. ,. ,. ,. }<(((_°>. ,. ,. ,. }<)))_°> V V V Andy Bentley Ichthyology Collection Manager University of Kansas Biodiversity

Agreed but this could be an iterative process as time, money and human capacity allows.

Andy
    A  :             A  :             A  :
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    V                V                V
Andy Bentley
Ichthyology Collection Manager
University of Kansas
Biodiversity Institute
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Lawrence, KS, 66045-7561<x-apple-data-detectors://9/>
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From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Callomon,Paul
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2023 10:30 AM
To: Sarah K. Huber <skhuber at vims.edu>; nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Cataloging unidentified, multi-species Lots

I would say that if you can even roughly separate them into groups morphologically (by color, body shape, eye size etc.) then each group should become an individual lot. That way your collection reports putative diversity in the samples, making it more likely that someone will come and do IDs for you.

Paul Callomon
Collection Manager, Malacology and General Invertebrates
________________________________
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
prc44 at drexel.edu<mailto:prc44 at drexel.edu> Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu>> On Behalf Of Sarah K. Huber
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2023 10:08 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] Cataloging unidentified, multi-species Lots

External.
What are people’s thoughts on cataloging unidentified, multi-species lots?

Here at the VIMS Fish Collection we have thousands of vials of unidentified larval fishes in multi-species lots (hundreds of thousands of individuals). The ability to identify all of these fishes prior to cataloging is daunting, and likely will not happen in the next 50 years. Especially since these lots come from collecting programs that are on-going, and we have limited personnel who are trained in taxonomic identification of larval fishes. I am debating the value of cataloging these lots without identifications. They all have good collection data, a count of the number of individuals per lot, and in many cases I can take a photograph of all individuals through the scope to attach to the collection record. The data and photographs would be made public. As individuals get identified out of these lots, they would receive a separate catalog number according to our normal protocols.

I would be interested to hear what people think about this approach.

Sarah K. Huber, Ph.D. (she/her)
Curatorial Associate, VIMS Nunnally Ichthyology Collection
Office 804.684.7104 | Collection 804.684.7285
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