Hi Alistair

The original concept of verification in Recorder was relatively complex - the idea as I understand it was that individuals in Recorder were assigned a 'role' (e.g. Original recorder, specialist) and taxa were assigned difficultly levels, meaning that 'individuals' (appearing in the names and addresses hierarchy) could either confirm or mark records as invalid. However, this system was never fully implemented (at least not in Recorder 6 anyway, not sure about Recorder 2002 but imagine this is the same), and in reality (in terms of assigning difficulty levels to taxa and updating people's roles etc.) this system would be very tricky to manage.

When I joined JNCC last year, the behaviour in Recorder 6 at that time was that if you edited a determination in anyway (even say just adding a comment) then this determination was flagged as 'passed validation'. Clearly this was incorrect, so in the interim I asked for Dorset Software to change this so that only if an additional determination (of confirmation or validation) added would the record be flagged as 'passed validation'.

Sorry if this has made things slightly more difficult for you at the moment - in hindsight, it might have been better to leave the behaviour as it was, but there were also other related issues such as records inputted using recording cards being automatically flagged as 'passed validaton' further complicating matters. The main thing I wanted to avoid was users unknowingly marking records as 'passed validation'.

We are reviewing this particular functionality at the moment, with a view to hopefully streamlining the process of verification in Recorder 6 in the future - making it faster and easier for users to verify records (and not problematic when it comes to exchanging data).

There are few posts on this topic but there is a list of suggested priority improvements to Recorder that everyone has been contributing to recently - see http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=420.

If you do have any ideas on how you would like to see verification work in Recorder, or have any particular requirements in this area by all means please post them under the above topic.

Best wishes,

I agree that records imported via the import wizard are often "pre-verified" and as such need to be flagged correctly. But equally, many spreadsheets that are imported are not. I'd personally like to have a determination type column that can be imported. I think if it worked correctly the blue text would be useful so I'm not in favour of removing it completely. Plus, in the new version (the long awaited 6.12), the situation has been greatly improved:

* Bob's suggested determination terms have been included by default
* Old, unused or otherwise unwanted determination types can be hidden
* For each determination type you can assign a verification level. So, the term "Considered Correct" would be assigned to the "Passed Verification" level, while "Considered Incorrect" term would be assigned to the "Failed/Pending Verification" level. This allows the user control over both determination types and verification levels.
* Batch updates will allow you to change a determination type en masse
* You can now save a list of all of the records you just imported at the end of the import wizard process; this list can then be used by the batch updater.

In addition it's much easier to apply a new determination to individual occurrences, so things a certainly looking up in 6.12. :)