Coden registration

[MICHAEL A. IVIE]

Several people have written to request how to determine a unique coden
for the ECN standard.  As I understood, institutions listed in the current
index of Insect and Spider Collections of the World (Arnett, Samuelson,
Heppner, Nishida, Watt, and Woodruff) would use the coden in it, or if
a new or specialized database, would register it with Chris Thomson at
USDA-SEL until a more formal setup could be arrainged.

Another point raised was the 6 digit number following the alphanumeric
identifier.  This was a minimum, and if more than a million numbers were
needed, those in the seventh place could become part of the alphanumeric
field.  An alternative is a letter following the coden, and then start over
from 0.  24 letters in single suffix mode would provide 24 million unique
numbers associated with a given coden.  Although the standard coden is
4 letters, there is no special status to this size.  The only thing about
it is that for a database of one million specimens, an extra letter adds
a storage need of 1 byte per cell, or 1 meg of disk space.

Mike Ivie