Presentation: CETAF and DiSSCo Collections Registry

Collections Catalogue
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CETAF & DiSSCo Collections Registry

This presentation is particularly relevant to discussions under the following topics:

Presentation on work by the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) on the CETAF and DiSSCo Collections Registry from Patrick Semal (RBINS), Ana Casino (CETAF), Laura Tilley (CETAF) and Franck Theeten (Africa Museum), April 2020 - available as Powerpoint or as PDF.

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In current publications, we generally use IRSNB to cite specimens of Recent fishes and herps from Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique. In the past, a variety of codes have been used to cite such specimens, including: IRScNB, ISBN, ISNB, ISNM, KBIN, KNMB, MRHN, RIB. What is the preferred code for citing specimens in publications? Is this specified in the Directory? Are obsolete codes included in the Directory? Thanks.

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The 2 legal names are IRScNB (FR Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique) and KBIN
(NL Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen). RBINS (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) is the international acronym used by GRSciColl and GBIF and often used in the international context.
The public name of the institution will change soon (rebranding) but the legal names will continue to exist. In the CETAF passport, all past and present recognized names of the institution can be encoded.

These other names are not valid to define RBINS:
ISBN is a code used to identify publication (International Standard Book Number). It is the ancestor of the DOI for a publication.
RIB is the code of the Bank account. Does not matter with collections

ISNB is a wrong name
MRHN is a wrong name
ISNM is not related to RBINS or it is is a wrong name
KNMB is not related to RBINS or it is is a wrong name

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Thanks for your reply. To refer to to RBINS…

ISNB was used in this publication: Arnett, R.H., G.A. Samuelson & G.M. Nishida. 1993. The Insect & Spider Collections of the World, 2nd ed.

ISNM is listed as “other abbrev.” here, but I do not know the original source.
http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/catalog/collections.asp?Mus=IRSNB

KNMB was used in this publication: Wilson, D.E., & D.M. Reeder. 2005. Mammal Species of the World. A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference, 3rd Ed. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

MRHN was used in this publication: Torres-Carvajal, O., P.J. Venegas & K. de Queiroz. 2015. Three new species of woodlizards (Hoplocercinae, Enyalioides) from northwestern South America. ZooKeys 494: 107–132.

RIB was used in this publication: Cogger, H.G., E.E. Cameron & H.M. Cogger. 1983. Zoological Catalogue of Australia, Vol. 1. Amphibia and Reptilia. Australia Government Publishing Service, Canberra.

All is to say that the published literature has assigned (often in error) a number of codes to RBINS.

In 2018, I corresponded Wim Wouters who pointed out that RBINS is the most preferred abbreviation in English literature and KBIN is mostly used in Dutch publications while RBINS is used in the French ones. He also pointed out that such complexity is inherent to multilingual countries.

Sorry to hear about the “rebranding”. Such initiatives only add to the complexity from a collections standpoint. cheers, Mark

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Just a suggestion on the “Institutional Profiles”…
“BE-RBINS Passport Collections” enjoys the largest font.
I would replace that with the legal name of the institution which highlights the institution over the “Code”.
BE-RBINS is relatively unambiguous.
But what about CZ-IICT? This is not used to cite specimens in a collection in the Czech Republic, but to cite specimens deposited in the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Centro de Zoologia, Lisboa (e.g., Gans 1976, Roselaar 2003). At a larger scale, “CI-” is often used as a code prefix for “collection ichthyological” and could be mistaken for Ivory Coast.

People who wish to cite specimens at a particular institution will need a clear guide to the proper code. Otherwise they might use old codes or simply make up their own. If I came upon a webpage that specified “BE-RBINS VZ-AMP” as the unique name for amphibian specimens in the RBINS collection, I would probably be reluctant to use that entire code as a prefix to a catalog number in a list of material examined. cheers, Mark

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Welcome Mark, great to see you here! Thanks for adding your insights and questions.

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Mark, what you already see happening in the very near (even now) future, is analogous to your Name (Mark Sabaj) in ORCID, along with your ORCID ID 0000-0002-5671-9933. In the future, with the standard being developed by TDWG, and current practices begun by both the past biodiversitycatalog (by Roger Hyam) and GRSciColl (by the Smithsonian, and now GBIF), collections and institutions do have “string” identifiers (like RBINS), but they also have GUIDs. In this way in the future, one can be very clear and unambiguous with references.

Once we have a registry in place, it will also be possible to say RBINS, aka [list all known aliases found in literature, or used formerly, or even in error]. So, some of this is also a change in expected SOP so that everyone is sure what collection is being referred to. This will also help collections, and collectors track use / citation / attribution / etc. (link to SEQ data, trait data, etc).

Hope this helps. It’s great to see your citations of these various findings. These will be great when building a wikidata page, in this example, for RBINS. One could then add known aliases (and likely there’s a wikidata property for sharing known codes used in error) and references for them. (Someone who knows more about wikidata statements than I do will know if this is possible).

To @mswoodburn where in our current CD standard would we be able to note / share known alias strings, and strings used in error or b/c of language differences?