Re: Standardizing insect labels on INBio format + DataMatrix; other buyers
To: Daniel Janzen <djanzen@sas.upenn.edu>
From: "Brian Brown" <bbrown@nhm.org>
Subject: Re: Standardizing insect labels on INBio format + DataMatrix;
other buyers
Cc: sackley@compuserve.com, bill.armstrong@intermec.com, brianb@mizar.usc.edu,
colwell@uconnvm.uconn.edu, christine.deal@intermec.com,
whallwac@sas.upenn.edu, djanzen@sas.upenn.edu, mkaspari@ou.edu,
becky_nichols@nps.gov, Chuck_Parker@nps.gov, KPerry@intermec.com,
cthompso@sel.barc.usda.gov, windsord@tivoli.si.edu, dl@pick.uga.edu,
longinoj@elwha.evergreen.edu, jugalde@inbio.ac.cr
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:00:49 -0700
>Pick, not sure if you all have discussed it, but were you all to agree on a
>standardized label and reader that could be bought as a package more or
>less, I am certain that there are "non-museum" types like me (and you to a
>certain degree) who would buy it for use in ecological study circumstances
>(a la Alas, you, GSMNP, etc.) so that as the materials collected in
>ecological projects came into a museum, to be discarded or kept as
>appropriate (and so indicated, then, in the individual records for them),
>it would already have the bar codes on the specimens and be accompanied by
>a DB with the content for those bar codes.
>
>This does raise the specter of letter acronyms at the front of the numbers
>that would represent a project rather than a museum, and the need to
>register them in a central place just as standard collection acronyms.
>But, I would guess that many ecological projects, especially long-term
>ones, would be happy to do that.
Dan (and others),
I would not start proliferating new acronyms that are not keyed to a
good institutional standard, like the Arnett et al. book. This will result
in confusion. Why not use an associated museum's barcodes? Jack Longino is
doing this with our museum- he uses LACM barcodes within his research, as he
is a Research Associate of our museum.
What would be the advantage of having a separate acronym for each
separate ecological study? The ALAS project doesn't have a separate code,
they just use the regular INBIO labels.
My $.02.
Brian
________________________________________
Brian V. Brown
Entomology Section
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90007, U.S.A.
tel: (213) 763-3363 fax: (213) 746-2999
email: bbrown@nhm.org
http://www.lam.mus.ca.us/lacmnh/departments/research/entomology
| Discover Life in America | Science | Unique Identifiers & Barcodes | Correspondence | Brian Brown - 29 July, 1999 |