Collection Date

[lowfatspread]

I recently came across a sheet which didn't specify a true date, rather
stated "collected many years ago" and then gave a date of 1925...

This crystalized a problem i had with the date recording mechanism you've got in place currently... would it not be better to allow for such an approximate date recording system to allow for Pre /before or Post / after date recordings... Many geneology systems allow for such impreciness...

you may also want to consider for the actual date system to be recorded. The assumption is that the specimens will all be recorded in a "standard" UK date fashion... but what if you had russian or middle eastern samples...

hth

[Tom Humphrey]

Thanks v. much for your suggestions about date recording. Although it may not be obvious the current recording does to some extent allow non-specific 'pre' dates, by entering the date in the 'to' date field rather than the 'from' field. I realise that that does not represent quite the same concept. You can add free-text notes to date entries by clicking the ellipsis (...) button to the right of the date field.

I think that 'post' date types will rarely be needed for recording sheets as, of necessity, the label is created after the collection event.

I'll look into the feasibility of adding support for 'pre' and 'post' dates to the database. I need to proceed with a bit of caution to avoid adding excessive complexity to either the database or the user-interface, but I think this would be a useful capability to have.

(For recording collectors' dates of birth and death the system already support vague 'pre' and 'post' dates).

At present I think that support for alternative calendar systems is not needed as the project is currently concentration of mainly UK-based collections. I have yet to encounter a herbarium sheet that doesn't use the Gregorian calendar, but should this problem arise then I'd be happy to revise the user-interface to support other calendar systems. Internally the database stores dates as Julian Day Numbers.

regards,

Tom
[email protected]