Specimen Citations

[Diana Horton]

I am struggling with the problem of specimen citations.  As was noted
recently, specimens are the data on which taxonomic research is based, so
citations of those specimens are critically important.  However, it is a
time-consuming process to enter specimen data into a spreadsheet/database.
Recently, it took about six hours to enter data on just over 100 specimens
(most were fairly quick, but about a third of them were from Europe and I
had to spend some time trying to decipher foreign languages to determine
locality).  -- I could annotate a lot of specimens in the time it took me
to enter those data (and I have a lot waiting to be annotated!), and no
editor is going to allow publication of all those citations (however, I
realize a copy could be placed in some library to make them available).

I would be interested to know whether people think that one should keep
records of *every* specimen one examines.  If not all, how many and how
does one decide which specimens to record?  As an alternative, would it be
acceptable just to cite a herbarium/repository acronym and the number of
specimens annotated, at least for some specimens (obviously, one will have
to record distributional data in some way even if a detailed specimen
citation is not kept)?

The info. I include in my specimen citations includes as much as possible
of the following:

Determination (mine)
Date Determined
Country
Province/State
County
lat/long
Sec/Township/range
Specific Locality, incl. ecol.
Collector
Collection #/Date
Notes (mine, on the specimen)
Original determination
Herbarium Acronym


Diana Horton
Herbarium and Biological Sciences
312 CB
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA  52242-1297
U.S.A.