Specimen Record Ownership and Management

By default, newly created specimen records are managed and editable by the user who creates them as well as any active management teams associated with the specimen via its collection/museum organization.  

However, specimens created before February 1st 2021 (the date MorphoSource 2.0 launched) are no longer managed or editable by the user who created them.  MorphoSource site administrators as well as active management teams are the only ones able to manage and edit these specimens.  

If you feel edits are required to a specimen you do not have edit access to, please contact us directly at morphosource@duke.edu to make your case.  Please provide the url of the specimen page in question.

All editors of specimen records should be aware that aggregator-ingested specimens (e.g. from iDigBio or GBIF) will be automatically updated via the aggregator API periodically.  Therefore the permanence of any custom edits to the specimen metadata cannot be guaranteed.  Users who want metadata in the specimen record to appear differently should contact the appropriate museum staff and ask them to change their recordset values.  Eventually changes by the museum informatics teams to the files they report to aggregators will make it to MorphoSource.