We regularly have batches of specimens from a single permit/MOU coming in over a period of months or even years. Currently we are creating separate accessions for these different batches to enable us to get figures for our KPI reporting. However in practice it is not practical to maintain these separate accessions, and they all relate to a single agreement or permit.
We would like to be able to record these batches in a structured way within an accession record. We would want to be able to record the received date and number of specimens for each individual batch – so that we can query these for our reporting needs. This would make the application of the accession numbers easier, as we often find with these long running projects that material is bought together and worked on by researchers making it time consuming and difficult to apply multiple accession numbers to the material.
Hello @rdrinkwater,
Thank you for reaching out!
We’ve opened a feature request on GitHub for your suggestion to add a batch tracking feature to a single accession record. This would allow you to record the date and number of specimens for each batch, all in one place, which would make reporting much easier.
Thanks!
Hey @rdrinkwater,
I have similar issues with our collection, but because we don’t have reporting requirements associated with Accessions, I have been lumping accessions by donor/project and explain in the remarks field that the accessions came from separate shipments/dates.
It seems like a good way to do “batches” might be to enable a many-to-one relationship between the already existing “Shipment” table and the Accession table in the next Specify Schema version, no?
The “Shipment” table links many-to-one already to the Exchange, Borrow, and Loan tables but not to Accessions for some reason. It’s odd; logically “Shipments” should be able to be linked to any table that has to do with material physically coming or going from a collection. And even if material isn’t technically “shipped” (for example, dropped off) it seems like Shipment is still an appropriate table to store “incoming batch” info in.
I would support that link between Shipments and Accessions being created rather than an additional table being added to the schema.