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What goes in catalogNumber? #227

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ianengelbrecht opened this issue May 27, 2019 · 7 comments
Closed

What goes in catalogNumber? #227

ianengelbrecht opened this issue May 27, 2019 · 7 comments

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@ianengelbrecht
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The current definition for catalogNumber doesn't specify whether the institution or collection codes should be included as part of this field or not. For example, at the Iziko South African Museum, the institution recently started concatenating these values to the catalog numbers in their database system. Historically (and what is represented on specimen labels until recently, and often cited in literature) there was a simple code, e.g. C1234. The institutionCode is SAMC, an example of a collection code, for entomology is ENW. The catalog numbers are now represented in the database as SAMC-ENW-C001234 (the catalog numbers are also being padded with zeros to make them the same length). Should dwc:catalogNumber be that full number or the simpler, original code given that we have other fields for the institution and collection codes?

@tucotuco
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The intention of dwc:catalogNumber was to capture the number separate from the codes, so just the number that went into the ledger or original catalog.

@ianengelbrecht
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Thank you John, makes perfect sense! May I suggest the definition be updated as such?

@baskaufs
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Action item: Add a comment field to dwc:catalogNumber (currently there is none). Suggested text: "The value should include only the number that went into the ledger or original catalog."

@tucotuco
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How about, "Unless there is a compelling reason, leave institution codes and collection codes out of the catalogNumber field and fill it instead with only the number that went into the original ledger or catalog."

@peterdesmet
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Ok with:

Recommended best practice is to leave institution codes and collection codes out of catalogNumber and populate it only with the number that went into the original ledger or catalog.

peterdesmet added a commit that referenced this issue Oct 21, 2019
Closes #227

Note: also fixed a typo where the issue date for http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/version/catalogNumber-2018-09-06 was still 2017-10-06

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@ianengelbrecht
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ianengelbrecht commented Oct 21, 2019 via email

@peterdesmet
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Based on that, we are not going to make a recommendation in the comments and leave this up to the specific collection communities.

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