This is more a Natural History Collections “in general” question than a Specify-specific one, but I was wondering if there is an accepted protocol for how to deal with Agent name changes. I suspect that for some Agents, like every department with Game in the title that switched to Wildlife you can …

Hi @VHough , That’s a great question, and this is a common challenge. I will leave the curatorial perspective to others who have insight to share, but the Specify platform has a preferred way of handling it that captures historical context. Specify’s principle on agents is that each unique person, …

@VHough this is an age old question, and one that has no perfect answer I’m afraid. For people, I use the agent’s current legal name as the agent name, and all other forms become Agent Variants. This is somewhat problematic in that reprinting a label for an old lot may in some cases produce a diff…

That’s a very good point about institutions that I hadn’t thought of! It’s easier to know if something like that is happening if they have a good wikipedia page, but some institutions I’ve been unable to find a clear understanding of their history. I will say that *pre-*Specify, parsing has been ve…

Hi @nfshoobs , Thank you for adding your insights! It is very helpful to have the real world examples and a breakdown of the pros and cons of different approaches. Maintaining persistent identifiers is a valid concern. We have documented the GUID loss during Agent merging issue for our programmer…

@SpecifyMembership Thanks for offering to get a proposal together for this feature. This issue is one of those things that is “simple, yet complex” in that I think there are many different ways that one could solve it, each of which may break some workflows in some collections. I added a comment to …

Hi Grant, all this has been very helpful! I’m in the process of implementing now, though, and I want to clarify something: At this moment, due to the fact that we are bastardizing something that is meant to be recording plant names, there is no option for creating other Agent Variant Types like “Ma…

Hi @VHough , Glad this could be of help! You can actually add additional options for variants! If you go to Agent Variant in Schema Config for your instance (e.g. https://sp7demofish.specifycloud.org/specify/schema-config/en/AgentVariant/ ), you can edit the varType pick list: [AgentVariant pick l…

@Grant I’ve always wondered – what does a “vernacular” name mean in the context of an agent? @VHough In our database, I reduced that picklist down to only have two options: Variant and Misspelling, since it doesn’t matter to us what the source of a variant is, and we don’t link agents to ReferenceW…

I realize that I’m a little late to this party: I’m now working to get my head around the Specify schema. We had a very functional database built on the original ASC model, but - for reasons that are too painful to relate - we’re now migrating to Specify. I found it very important to be able to use…

Agent name protocol

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Grant November 17, 2025, 7:15pm 10

Hi @nfshoobs,

My understanding is that a “vernacular” name for an agent would just be any alternate or non-standard name for that person.

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Agent name protocol

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