Dear Friends,
in my opinion it is better to have as few fields as
possible in a database.
The lower number of fields you have the easier and
faster it is to enter data.
At the beginning I had a database with fields
like "excoll", "way of cleaning", and some others but
with time and practice I decided to delete them: their
information was not so precious and the time saved
avoiding moving between unuseful fields is consistent
when you deal with hundreds of records.
When possible, I included its information in another
field: for example, "ex coll" info went into legit
field, writing "by way of ...".
Moreover, I have aggregated information in single
fields: country, province, locality, coordinates,
height, habitat are in my database in a single field
named "locality".  In this way printing locality data
(which comprises all the above information) is easier.
Despite this latter opinion may be questionable due to
personal preferences, I strongly believe important to
include author in the same field of species-
subspecies.  I think this is a more correct way of
keeping data, since a name is nothing without the
author (and date) who described it.
I strongly agree with Alfonso Pina's opinion, also
because a "very well known and stable Systematics" is a
real utopia...
However, I built a similar way of organizing the
systematics of my collection, giving numbers to
classes, orders and families so that they can be
sorted.  In every family genera and species are listed
alfabetically.
Regards,
Paolo


Paolo Giulio ALBANO
Bologna, ITALY
E-mail: [log in to unmask]