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NHMDenmark / DanSpecify

Important files regarding the Danish instance of the Specify database system for collections digitisation and management, plus placeholder for issue tracking. Guidelines, manuals and other kinds of documentations will be gathered on the wiki.
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Merge ENT spreadsheets into Specify #226

Open fire-bot opened 1 year ago

fire-bot commented 1 year ago

Sent by @FedorSteeman (fedor.steeman@snm.ku.dk). Created by fire.

Attached is an example of a spreadsheet that students use for recording specimens for their various projects, many of the specimens are from NHMD, but some to many maybe from various other institutions.

My idea was that if we can record all these specimens (from NHMD and other collections) in Specify, then we can use it as the main DB for all our lab projects. This would be great, as it brings discipline and an overview. Importantly, that would stimulate to record the NHMD material to Specify which currently lab members do not have any incentive to do. That, however, requires a compromise that Specify allows data entry for the non-NHMD material with clear indication of their belonging (acronyms for other institutions). Can we achieve this somehow? As I understood, a compromise could be if we 1) do not publish and clearly mark non-NHMD material records and 2) in the lab spreadsheets we use a certain mandatory set of fields that facilitate smooth import to Specify. It is ok that some columns very specific for particular projects are not entered in Specify and kept with certain students. The most important is that crucial information gets into Specify.

This is what we discussed at our last Ento-group meeting which you joined. If I understood you correctly you wanted to see an example of our project spreadsheet to add and mark all mandatory fields that should be there. So, here an example is attached.

Thanks for trying to resolve this! This is not urgent but it would be great to implement for managing specimens in the projects and simultaneously increase registration of the NHMD material to Specify at a cost that some other (non-NHMD) material will be there, but clearly marked as such and for internal use only.

I hope this makes sense.

Alexey

Attachments:

  1. combined_spreadsheets.xlsx
FedorSteeman commented 2 months ago

Not all of these spreadsheets may be of relevance for Specify, since they may not all contain records. However, we could create an entirely separate installation for the needs of Alexey and his team, from which we then can export and import relevant records according to our needs.