Date: 2024-03-04T06:00:00Z
Host: Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh
In botany, a common practice historically has been to mount several different specimens on a single herbarium sheet. In addition, some large organisms will often be mounted across several sheets. In this workshop, we will present how the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh handles these kinds of specimens and then open up discussion on what other ways of managing these are being used by other herbaria.
Dear all, thank you for the great video.
It answered many questions and raised many more 
Could I ask whether the fields I saw in the presentation: ‘Sheet number’ and ‘Num. in set’ were user-defined and intended to be filled in manually? Of is the second field Num. in set’ somehow an automatic count of the number of preparations in a collection object (something I really need).
We did not have such fields in our database and I created them from some available text fields. I plan to use them on a herbarium sheet label as follows:
Sheet 1/3 (1 should come from ‘Sheet number’ and 3 from ‘Num. in set’).
Sheet 2/3 (2 should come from ‘Sheet number’ and 3 from ‘Num. in set’)
…
Was this the intended use in your databases?
In our database, we have also the fields (already in the original data schema) Count and Current count, and consequently Total Items and Total current items but it seems that they were only counting the number of items in/on a preparation and I could not use them to count the number of preparations.
I will be happy to get a feedback on my questions.
Kind regards,
Salza
Curator of the collection database at the NMNHS-BAS
Hi Salza,
Sheet Number and Num. in Set are user defined fields (integer 1 and 2). They are filled in manually by the user. The way you have set it up looks to be how we use it, with the Num. in Set being the total number of sheets and Sheet Number being the number given to an individual sheet.
We have count hidden on the forms and it has a defaul of 1, as we never have more than 1 object forming a preparation.
I hope this answers your question
Robyn
Thank you, Robyn,
This is exactly the way we defined them. Perfect!
I just finished cleaning our Count fields (removing numbers higher than 2, which are remnants from the period when we attempted to use as count in sheet 1/2, etc before I realised that their values are summed up in Total Count Amount). Now I plan to hide them as well.
Regards,
Salza