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12 Cienaga Brava, part of Lake San Sylvestre, Barranca- Barranca-Bermeja; L. San Sylvestre, 2 Bermeja 13 Smugglers Cove, Santa Cruz Island Santa Cruz Island; Smugglers Cove 14 Coches Prietos Anchorage, Santa Cruz Island Santa Cruz Island; Coches Prietos 15 Northern Rhodesia Rhodesia*; 16 Franklin Park Zoo Franklin Park Zoo; 17 Cambridge, Harvard Campus Cambridge; Harvard 18 Caccachara, W of Ilave (16,000 ft) 16 41'S, 70 1'W Ilave; Caccachara, 16000' 19 Caccachara, W of Ilave (15,000 ft) 16 41'S, 70 1'W Ilave; Caccachara, 15000' 20 No data NO DATA; (all such collections) 21 possibly Wyoming Wyoming?; 22 Maine; T9-R7 (?, possible Maine; T9-R7) 23 Rocky Mts (no other data) possibly Rocky MT?; or MCZ 12345; Place naming rules. The most general principal of place naming rules is that the leading part of the name (termed here a "keyword name") be a recognizable geographic entity, in particular, one that most data entry personnel would associate with the locality in question. [later on we may offer ways to search by other criterion, e.g. county or state, making this less critical] For those collections described by complete locality descriptions, this most frequently will be a city or possibly a river, lake or mountain. Difficulties will arise for incomplete or 'probable' localities and for foreign localities with difficult to distinguish hierarchies of place names. The next most important rule is consistency in place name structure. The advantage of complying with these rules is that MUSE will be sure to show you all relevant place names, and searching for specific localities will be much easier. Examples of such consistency rules include: Follow each keyword name with a semicolon, then the restriction on that keyword. Use standard abbreviations for compass directions (W, NW, SSE), geographic features (R for river, Mt[?] for mountain, etc) and distance units (km, mi). The following guidelines are a preliminary suggestion on how to name places. Table 1 contains some examples of problem localities and proposed solutions. Examples included below all refer to entries in that table. 1. Follow the keyword with the most specific part of the remaining locality description. This may seem counter intuitive and your first inclination would be to use a descending hierarchy of description (e.g., City, direction, distance, specific site). However, the place names are only a convenience for recognizing sites and not a replacement for the actual locality description (which is entered on the locality record itself). 2. Consider lumping various descriptions of uncertainty into a single keyword followed by question mark. "Probably Wyoming", "Wyoming ?", and "possibly Wyoming" would all become "Wyoming?". "Near Wyoming" could be interpreted as the same as these or differently. 3. Similar localities (4 and 5, 11 and 12) are best distinguished by sequential integers appended to the place name rather than attempting to include more descriptive information in the name. Consider entries 4 and 5. Attempting to be more precise in defining the sites would be difficult (e.g. including 'near') with little information gained. The functions in MUSE that list the available places associated with each keyword will include the ability to examine the complete locality so as to be able to distinguish sites. 4. All records that are missing all locality data use the standard entry "NO DATA;". In a typical natural history collection there may be hundreds or thousands of such entries. This may seem artificial, but conceptually, absence F-2 F: Site Names
of data is identical for all such specimens. 5. Zoo or aquarium specimens are indicated with the place name being the donating institution (entry 16). Wild caught animals subsequently donated by zoos present a problem with no obvious solution (unless documentation of collecting site is convincing). 6. Elevational differences at the "same" locality are to be treated as different places (entries 18 and 19). The simplest format is: keyword, specific landmark, elevation. 7. Broadly descriptive localities (e.g. entries 15 and 23) are difficult to deal with. They may not fit into a standard geo-political hierarchy and almost always include (at least implicitly) a degree of uncertainty. Marine collections that fall into this category are perhaps even more problematic. Consider "off Florida", which could be in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, in Cuban territorial waters, or simply along the coast of Florida. While this problem is more crucial when entering the locality information itself, we have chosen the appending of an asterisk ('*') to the keyword as the convention for recognizing such place names as different from slightly more distinctive (but not necessarily more precise) designations such as "Florida" or "Rhodesia". Most viewers of such data should recognize that convention as some form of variant meaning (as opposed to a coded value that would require interpretation using printed or automated rules). 8. Grammatically distinctive descriptions of the same locality (e.g. entries 10 and 11) should be lumped to the same place name. This obviously is a grey area and one that different disciplines and different collections may want to vary in their interpretation. There are good reasons to be wary of using modern translations of historical descriptions of places. Only with careful research (travel logs, field notes) can we be certain that the Silver City of today is the same as the same name of 100 years ago or that the addition of a more precise direction and distance (entry 10) does not in some way differentiate a locality. But as indicated in rule 3, these are only place names not references to actual collections made on a specific day. The inclusion of date as part of the actual locality record ensures that only collections of highly probable identity are referenced by a single locality record. 9. Long keywords (and place names in general) will have to be dealt with as best as possible. Entry 14 shows one example, in other cases, abbreviations of the specific part of the place name would be better. 10. Completely vague locality descriptions (entry 23) are probably best not assigned a keyword as any phrase has a high chance of being misinterpreted. The associated catalog number (MCZ 12345) will uniquely link that locality record with the specimen data. If a series of sequential catalog numbers are unequivocally associated then a range of catalog numbers (e.g. UMMZ 11223-11230) would form an acceptable entry (presuming that date information was also identical). F-3 F: Site Names
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Tutorial and Reference Manual Julia
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The MUSE Project Building 3, Resear
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iii About This User's Guide This ma
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List of Figures Figure 1 Partial da
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7 Adding New Records to the Databas
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Hardware Required Installing MUSE M
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5) Check CONFIG.SYS file 1-4 a) Typ
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Hierarchical Taxonomic Dictionary T
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1The two groupings are "entities" i
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using that combination. For example
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NOTE: If, at your site, data for tw
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Answering Prompts Configuration Exi
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Page 29 and 30: IF THEN Generic and specific MUSE a
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Page 41 and 42: first retrieve the list with that n
Page 43 and 44: Editing a Loan form which appears,
Page 45 and 46: 2) For complete or partial returns,
Page 47 and 48: select "Fix Mistake" from the "Loan
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Page 51 and 52: Forms per Page in the "Attribute" c
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Page 63 and 64: APPENDIX D: Sample FORMCAP File Sam
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Page 67 and 68: (left_margin + 16.0, *) "Count" (le
Page 69 and 70: Figure 1 Jar Label/Dot Matrix Figur
Page 71 and 72: Figure 5 Multi-lot label for tank,
Page 73 and 74: APPENDIX E: Configuration Items Sys
Page 75: APPENDIX F: Creating Site Names In
Page 79 and 80: Help ii, iii, iv, 1-3, 3-1, 5-1, 5
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