Manually creating records from biodiversity and natural history collections
Not all biodiversity museums have made all (or sometimes any) of their records available to the portal. In such cases you will not be able to find the specimen record using our portal and will have to manually create a record.
Manually created record - After all options for finding an iDigBio record have been exhausted, a manual record will need to be created. The first step in creating a new specimen record is selecting the specimen’s home institution. If the institution is not a search result, follow these instructions https://duke.atlassian.net/wiki/display/MD/Frequently+Asked+Questions#FrequentlyAskedQuestions-HowdoIsetupanorganizationrecordformyspecimens? The following step asks for the specimen's taxonomy. It is best to select the GBIF search result. The following step allows you to fill in the identifying information for the specimen. Institution code and catalog number are required. Not all specimens will have a collection code, however, for those that do, it is also required.
The Occurrence ID field should be filled in ONLY IF you are positive it is the official, museum-assigned occurrence ID. Even though occurrence IDs may sometimes contain the specimen's catalog number as part of its value, it is very important to recognize that occurrence IDs are NOT the same thing as catalog numbers. Click this link to see examples of occurrence IDs with explanations of how to find them in certain public specimen databases. We use the occurrence ID field to automatically link user-created specimen records with museum authored ones on a periodic basis when museums publish new records on iDigbio that weren't available at the time of specimen creation. Therefore if you enter something that is not the official occurrence ID for the specimen you create, it could (by random chance) be the occurrence ID of another unrelated specimen at a different museum and cause the system to incorrectly replace your specimen with a different record. More information on Occurrence IDs can be found here.
The identifier field is for unique handles identifying the work. An example would be a DOI for a journal article, or an ISBN or OCLC number for a book. The Related URL field can be used to link a website or other specific content (video, audio, PDF document) related to the work. An example is the URL for a research project from which the work has derived.
The rest of the fields are optional, but if the particular information exists for the specimen, we ask that it please be added to the specimen record. For example, locality information for fossil records is strongly encouraged.