Hello there

This is a question for discussion regarding how much customisation of term lists is advisable or practical.

I have been advising my volunteers and seasonal wardens to adapt the Abundance and Record type term lists to enable them to make an accurate representation of the record they are digitising. 95% of the time they check with me before going ahead, however the latest question I've recently been asked how best  to record aspects of breeding territories to include things like:

• Immature, Sub-adult
• 2nd/3rd year bird
• 3rd/4th year bird
• Alarmed adult male
• Alarmed adult female
• Distraction behaviour
• Adult male with nest material
• Adult female with nest material
• Adult male with food
• Adult female with food

Certainly we can do some of them with combinations of 'Measurement type -Abundance-Measurement qualifier ' and 'Record type' .  Adding some solutions will make it simpler for the wardens who have many thousands of seabirds in colonies to monitor, together with our other principal form of data-entry, the import wizard. The only other solution is to get them to do lots of comments, which may or may not show up in reporting and is extremely time-consuming.

The other main point of concern is a definitive definition for terms such as "few", "many", "several"  or "a flock". I have issued a wee table that is included in our metadata explaining our approach which consists of figures and accuracy variables.

Yet this strikes me as possibly self defeating. After all, as the whole point of digitising our record is to disseminate them to Statutory Bodies, LRC’s and NBN, then are we just adding potential confusion to the data-uploading processes?

So I ask two questions: what to other folk actually do in this situation and what should we as a body do?

I remember the debate regarding validation and verification qualifiers back in November at the NFBR Conference being fascinating and wonderfully heated, however, can we draw any firm conclusions from it?