Reference Manual

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About This User's Guide
This manual is intended primarily as a guide to the installation and daily use of
MUSE. It also provides the information needed to modify or design new paper
forms, such as specimen labels, to be printed from MUSE. It is not intended as
a guide to initial choice of data fields or design of your data structure, nor to the
initial setup or later alteration of your data structure, nor to the modification of
data-entry screens or other items in MUSE. Additional documentation is planned
or is being prepared to provide guidance on these topics.
Information about the contents of fields is not provided in this manual. There are
some details in the context-sensitive help; press while on a field to get
some idea of the expected contents. Additional manuals outlining data standards
are currently being prepared.
Information about installation of MUSE is located in the first chapter.
Chapters 1, 2 and 3 ("Introduction," "MUSE Data Files" and "Some MUSE
Concepts") provide information about MUSE software and required hardware,
some important data files and their relationships within MUSE, and some
conceptual background information on the use of Catalog Numbers and Field
Numbers in natural history collections and in MUSE.
Chapter 4, "Getting Started," describes how to load Btrieve and MUSE at the
beginning of a MUSE work session.
Chapter 5, "Menus and Moving Around in MUSE," describes the MUSE menu
system and how to select items, how to access on-line help from within MUSE,
and how to set certain configuration items in MUSE.
Chapter 6, "Browsing and Editing Records," leads you through the process of
accessing MUSE data files, finding selected records, paging through records,
editing fields, and saving data records to disk.
NOTE: So that you can practice accessing and editing records, a newly
installed MUSE may contain a few sample records in several of the data
files. It is important that you thoroughly test MUSE by adding, editing
and deleting records)and resolve any problems)before you begin serious
data entry for your collection.
Chapter 7, "Adding New Records to the Database," guides you through the steps
in adding new records to the Primary and Locality data files.
Chapter 8, "Other Useful Functions," describes a number of additional features
and functions that are available while adding, editing or browsing records.
Chapter 9, "Printing Specimen Labels," describes and guides you through the
portion of MUSE that deals with the printing of labels.
About This User's Guide