Request - Educational Collection Attribute Marker

[Kmullineaux]

• new feature or otherwise a good idea to make Arctos even better

Describe what you're trying to do

The NHSM has a permanent collection, but we also have educational collection objects that lack data but are cataloged in Arctos for tracking and management purposes. I would like to create an attribute that can be used to mark educational collection items and be used to filter them out when querying the collection. Also, if it's possible, I'd like to make them private from public searching.

Thank you!

[mkoo]

I am puzzling over your request and think I need more information and examples (use cases). If you prefer please contact me for a zoom meeting or let me know if you can attend the next Arctos office hour and I will try to attend too!

[campmlc]

This sounds like a good use case for an encumbrance to mask record from public view which can be named educational collection. Not sure about filtering - if you mean from.public searches, the encumbrance would work. For curatorial searches, you could query from a public login.

[mkoo]

One could treat as encumbrance but it has some "costs" (curatorial management ones are the first that come to mind), which may not be a sustainable in the long run. Do they have to be in the same collection as specimens at all?

[Kmullineaux]

@mkoo and @campmlc Thank you for your replies! The educational items are not accessioned, but for management purposes, I've cataloged them in Arctos and attached them to placeholder accession records that provide information on their acquisition. For example, we may have a taxidermy duck that we use for education and display without data. In this case, we'd want to be able to track it internally, but the public/researchers browsing our records online would have no use for it. Therefore, we want to make it unavailable or at least distinguishable. I can see the benefits of an encumbrance for this.

Regarding whether they have to be in the same collection, I've puzzled over this as well. I don't see why they need to be. However, some are already cataloged under their related collections. Would that cause an issue if we moved them to a new educational collection?

[dustymc]

public/researchers browsing our records online would have no use for it.

Who can know what super-cool question someone might answer with a well-usd low-data duck?!? (There's always some data - it wasn't collected tomorrow....)

distinguishable

I will ~always recommend simply cataloging what you have, and letting that control how it's used.

same collection

The "usual" approach (if there's any such thing) is to keep these things in a separate teaching collection. If that makes anything easier for you then I'd encourage requesting such a collection, but I'd still recommend just cataloging what you have there in case it's more useful than expected.

I'd also encourage you to use loans and projects in the same way you would for any usage, however you end up handling this stuff - documenting how collections support education is one bit of research which your no-data duck can clearly support (if it's not hidden away!).

[Kmullineaux]

@dustymc Yes, good point. The duck is not a phantom without any information! I will continue puzzling on this with my team members to see what works best for us. If we decide on a teaching collection in the future, is it possible to change the associated collection of an already-cataloged object, or would we need to catalog it again and delete the old record?

[dustymc]

change the associated collection

That's not user-accessible but we can help, sooner (before the data finds ways to get complex) will be smoother.