nsandlin
commented
4 months ago Further thoughts: Rather than "contributor" (the individual involved in lending the specimen), it would probably be more useful to list where the specimen can be found and examined. All but a few of the ~1,700 images now have the institution of the lender listed under DetMediaContributor, with "Provenance" as the value in the DetContributorRole field, as decreed by Sharon (I will fix the handful of noncompliant ones). Some contributors are unaffiliated individuals, though, so on the website the public-facing label for the information should be like "Specimen Location" not "Institution."
A plan for this long-sought feature.
BY PHOTOGRAPHER. Parties are always recorded in the MulMultimediaCreator_tab field, with "Photographer" in MulMultimediaCreatorRole_tab. (Perhaps simpler, it is always the second array element, with LinEpig=Creator as the first.) It would need to be imported in the Search.
BY CONTRIBUTOR. The text string input in DetSource has very high precision and consistency of structure. Simple pattern matching would return the name (and affiliation, if any) of the party that supplied the image or specimen pictured. Currently this would return about 20-25 sources, which it would be nice to capture in a dropdown. This field is already imported in the Search, and displayed on Detail pages. The pattern match would only need to find one of four strings, and return everything after the match; in the case of a failed match, $2 would be set to "Field Museum" '.(contributed by |courtesy of |gift of |vouchered by )(.)'
Notes: This approach replaces Issue #16 because when the specimen now belongs to the Field Museum, the contributor of the images or specimen is no longer recorded in EMu. This approach avoids the use of Transaction info as both needlessly complex and not reliable in terms of returning the information relevant to LinEpig users, and because accessions and loans together represent a shrinking portion of the contributions compared with contributed images.