We’re really excited to be a new member of the Specify family, and we’re currently in the process of migrating our collections to Specify 7 (testing with version v7.10.2.1). While we were testing, we found an issue that’s come up in a few times in this forum, but we are still trying to figure out how to get around it.
A lot of our collections have entries/objects that have more than one collector. When we import our collections through the Workbench, I’m just not sure if there’s a way to refine our data so that the collector field (e.g. Last name, First name) can handle more than one agent/name, so that Specify can accurately generate new agents based on our entries.
This is more of an issue for our migration to Specify 7. It seems fine to enter multiple collectors through Specify’s data entry form.
First, welcome to the forum! Glad to have you here.
Multiple collectors can be entered through the workbench by defining them as Collector 1, Collector 2, Collector 3 etc. The mapping would look something like this (note that in your database, Field No:Locality probably says Collecting Information)
We were wondering if it would be possible to use a delimiter in one field (e.g. ‘Collector 1 – Last Name’) to indicate that names separated by a semicolon represent different collectors/agents. However, I realise that this probably isn’t feasible, so splitting our ‘Collectors’ field, which currently contains all the collectors separated by a semicolon, into five or six fields (e.g. ‘Collector 1’, ‘Collector 2’, etc.) might be the only option. Is that right?
I would also like to mention that our ultimate goal is to export to Darwin Core Archive, ideally with all the collector information aggregated into one field separated by a vertical bar (|) rather than a semicolon.
… splitting our ‘Collectors’ field, which currently contains all the collectors separated by a semicolon, into five or six fields (e.g. ‘Collector 1’, ‘Collector 2’, etc.) might be the only option. Is that right?
Yes, that is the only option. Each field must be represented as a distinct column in the data set, so you cannot use a separator like a semicolon to indicate this separation in the WorkBench.
I would also like to mention that our ultimate goal is to export to Darwin Core Archive, ideally with all the collector information aggregated into one field separated by a vertical bar (|) rather than a semicolon.
You can configure the separator for exports by modifying the table aggregation format. This is entirely possible and is not restricted by the format used during data import!
