Querying across various disciplines

If we create additional Disciplines within our Division, are we able to query across those various disciplines? I’m thinking about extended specimen connections, like connecting insects in Entomology that are collected from botanical specimens. Or knowing all of the plants, birds, mammals, herps, and insects within a given specific geography through a single query.

Hi @krandall

Welcome to the forum! Some things are able to be queried across disciplines, depending on where that table sits in the institutional hierarchy.

For example, since Agent is at the Division level, this can be queried for across disciplines. However, a Collection Object cannot normally[1] be queried for across disciplines because it exists further down in the hierarchy.

You could explore Collection Object Relationships as a way to link collection objects across disciplines. The query for geography and showing all collection objects associated with that geography I don’t believe is possible at present.

There is an issue open to allow for searches outside of the scopings: Query across collections (Add the ability to run a query without any scoping) · Issue #2903 · specify/specify7 · GitHub


  1. There are some special cases and some quirks that can be leveraged (for example, you could go through Agent > Collector > Collecting Information > Collection Object to view Collection Objects from another discipline, assuming they all had collectors) but these are tricks rather than solutions. ↩︎