collection DB design

[Szito, Andras (Entomology)]

Dear Colleagues

You can check out Insect Collection DB of Agriculture Western Australia at
http://www.agric.wa.gov.au/progserv/plants/ento/    in the Insect Reference
Colleciton section.  We hope to build a WWW front end for it over the next
few months.

The story is:

Our retired curator had started putting some entries in a flat file database
about 5 years ago.  After he left, Rob Emery and  Jon Wardrop
 (mjw at solutions.co.nz) got together and came up with a user friendly
MSAccess database which used the structure of the Australian National Insect
Collection.  This way  we got the best of both worlds.  Then imported the
13,000 flat-file records from our previous curator, this took about a week
to populated all the related tables.

Since then we have added a few new fields, a linked loans database with form
letters, integrated backups, context sensitive help, label printing, ole
links to pictures etc.  We reckon its pretty good.

We are not however, set up to market it as a sort of stand-alone
application, instead we just hand over the database sans data.  You could
then delete, rename whatever fields are not applicable and edit lookup
tables like "collection method" and replace things like "sweep net" with
"fishing rod" or "shotgun".
The only reason we sell it is to try and recover some of the development
costs because, as you can imagine, our collection is poorly funded.  We have
already sold it for A$400 and I guess it would be unfair to those people
that have it to sell it for less.

Inquiries to: Rob Emery
Email:  robe at apb.agric.wa.gov.au
or Andras Szito
Email: andrass at apb.agric.wa.gov.au

Regards,

Andras Szito
Curator
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Agriculture Western           Tel: 61 09 3683202
Australia                     61 09 3683333
Entomology Branch        Fax: 61 09 3683223
3 Baron-Hay Court                  61 09 3672625
SOUTH PERTH              Email:
Western Australia 6151        andrass at apb.agric.wa.gov.au
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