Herbaria-CSpace update July 30, 2010

Andrew, Dick, Lam and Chris met on July 29 to review where we are in map out some next steps.

Lam, Susan and Glen put in some heroic work to get a customized CollectionSpace 0.7 instance ready. This instance was featured as a live demo given on 19 July 2010 at UCCSC 2010, the University of California Computing Services Conference, by Chris Hoffman and Marlita Kahn, "Introducing CollectionSpace: A collection management system for museums A to Z (Art to Zoology.  See the Events page for more information and the PowerPoint slides from the presentation.

It is likely that initially we will not create a demo site based on the 0.8 release.

Chris went over the current status of the CollectionSpace project as a whole and described some overall goals for the UCJEPS-CollectionSpace deployment project. We are still targeting a deployment sometime in the second quarter of the 2011 calendar year (April to June). Andrew said that they want to start working with the system as soon as possible. Currently the system is not very usable because of limited functionality and performance issues. Agreed, and that should start up especially in the fall. Dick and Andrew will get busier when the semester starts up, so we should do some good work on mapping here in August (on locations, vouchers, borrows, and exchanges).

Storage locations: Currently UCJEPS does not track storage location at the cabinet level, but it might be useful in the future. For now, storage location is inferred from collection type and other information and basically maps to wet storage, dry storage, fruit and cone, botanical, and type collection. It is closely though not completely related to the object kind (objkind) attribute on the accession. In SMASCH, the filing name (a version of the taxonomic name) identifies which cabinet should house the specimen. The filing name nearly always is the same as the current identification, but of course, some times it does not work that cleanly. Action item: Lam and Dick will work on the rules to determine storage location. Lam will map that in the schema.

Question: Will a user be able to attach a document (like a spreadsheet) to any object or procedural record? That will be very helpful.

Vouchers: Voucher records in SMASCH were created for one purpose but evolved to become a way of adding various types of information to the specimen record. See the separate document about voucher records .

Types: Natural history collections record the biological type as an attribute of a specimen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_type);