Search/query links & default search for the web portal

New Feature Requests
1

For the online Specify web portal, it would be incredibly useful to have urls for search results. For example, if I want to share a link to our specimens of a particular genus+species, that would be nice. Having urls for search results would allow other databases to directly link to our specimens of a particular species, which would really increase our access and exposure by a large amount.

Additionally, it would be very helpful to us if the default search options could be permanently changed or changed to the option “contains”. Instead, the default is “=” for exact matches only. I have to change the search options almost every time I use the web portal. For us at the UF herbarium, only 2 parameters are typically more helpful as “=” for exact matches, i.e. Accession Number and Collector Number.

Both of these issues make it burdensome to instruct users how to access our specimens online. Usually, I tell users to go to a Symbiota portal to access our specimens because the search functions are easier, and they have urls.

I am new to this forum, so please accept my apologies if this has been covered elsewhere or if this post was misplaced or improper.

Many thanks,
Alan Franck
University of Florida herbarium

2

@francka One other way to achieve the same result is to create a guest user in your Specify 7 instance (if you are using it) and then you can send URL’s to individual specimens or queries to people. As guest users they can only view but will get the full record.

The general thinking is no new development will be done on the Specify 6 web portal and some version of it will be incorporated into Specify 7 at some point.

Aklso, as you mention, most of the aggregators (GBIF, iDigBio, etc.) all support URL’s to individual specimens.