We (Shetland Biological Records Centre) have recently moved our database from Recorder 3.3 to Recorder 6. I’m still getting to grips with the system so apologies if this is a silly question or if my terminology is wrong!

I have created a Recording Card for WeBS wildfowl counts, which includes just species and abundance fields. After entering a few of these for different sites/dates, I checked the data. Using the Report Wizard to find ‘Taxon Records’, and restricting the search to the source (Document) specified in the recording card, the system returned only the records that were entered before I created the Recording Card (i.e. in Recorder 3.3). After some head scratching, I realised that this is because the ‘Document’ on the recording card is assigned to the sample, rather than each occurrence within it.

This in itself shouldn’t be a huge issue – if, for example, I want to find all counts of a particular species from the WeBS survey, I could access the survey directly through the Documents window, bring up the related samples and sort them by species. However, all of the data that has been transferred from Recorder 3 has the source/document assigned to each occurrence, rather than the sample. As far as I can see, this means that if, instead, I want to find all counts of that species from the WeBS survey from the last 5 years, I’d have to do two separate searches from the Documents window, for related samples and related occurrences. (The data transferred from Recorder 3 are allocated to surveys based on date range, rather than to actual surveys so I can’t access them that way.)

So I have two questions really: Firstly, is there a way to search – either through the Report Wizard or otherwise – for ALL records that are linked to a source/document, either by occurrence or through the sample? And secondly, if this isn’t possible, is there a batch update that would allow me to link a sample’s document to all of the occurrences within that sample?

Many thanks, and apologies again if I’m missing something really obvious!

Rory