Using multiple institution pages in GRSciColl?

Hi all!

We’re a national museum and herbarium about to start publishing our collection datasets (starting with botany), and I want to get our institution and collection pages cleaned up and connected properly.

Is there a model or best practice for using multiple institution pages? We’re already in the system as NMNZ (museum) and WELT (herbarium), but that would seem to split off our botanical collections from the zoological, and suggest NMNZ is only zoological.

If we keep two institution pages, can we associate both of them with the botany dataset, or is there a better way of handling this?

Hi something similar happened in Ecuador we used to have two institutions, the national museum MNCE and the national herbarium QCNE which where mergeito one Institution by a law now INABIO

What can be done maybe is
a) merge bot institution as one on GRSCICOLL and use both acronyms one as principal and the other as additional
b) maintain the both institutions and use the other institucional acronym as alternate on each one

That will make that in each one the occurrence data for the two ware going to be in the institution page but only the data for each collection will be at the collection page

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Thank you, good to know about those ways of keeping institutions connected. :slight_smile:

We have the same problem at NMNH. The Herbarium institution record is created in GRSciColl from the ingest of the Index Herbariorum. We leave that one alone and link our Botany records to that institution code. We maintain another Institution record for NMNH as a whole and we do include a collection record for our Botany Department but provide the following information in the Description of that collection, “Cross-listed as a separate institution”. Both the Botany Collection and the Herbarium Institution record use the code US. We specify US as an alternate code in our NMNH institution record. I don’t think merging them is feasible since GRSciColl is linked to the Index Herbariorum. That Herbarium only record would be recreated upon next sync.

Thanks! That’s a good point about the herbarium record being re-created when IH syncs again.

I found a way to go over it, I hope @mgrosjean doesnt get mad.

I just convert the IH institution to a collection and put it on the new isntitution I created.

And when the IH records sync it doesn’t recreate the Institution Herbarium record?

Nope, it doesnt, it only updates the collection regsitry.

this are some IH records that have been converted to collections

@lucyschrader You can always disconnect (or ask to disconnect) an institution entry from Index Herbariorum. As long as the collection is still connecter, no new entry will be created during synchronisation.

Once an institution is disconnected, it can be modified to be more generic or merged with another entry. For example, the herbarium could be a “collection” associated with a larger institution (a university for example).

If you would like to go ahead with disconnecting an entry from IH but don’t have the permission, please contact us at scientific-collections@gbif.org

Thank you @vechocho for sharing your experience!

Thanks everyone! I think that gives us a good steer on what to do.

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