Re: Cross-match for Coleopterists
Following a successful installation of Recorder 6.10 on Derek Lott's PC (N.B. Derek wrote and published the Staphylinidae bit of the Coleoptera checklist which Andrew Duff sent to NHM for incorporation into the current Recorder checklists) I've received the following message from him as he began importing spreadsheet records:
I put a batch of data into RECORDER after you left and it went in like a dream except for one rather fundamental problem arising from the formatting of scientific names in the beetle checklist, Binomial nomenclature has been abandoned by inserting subgeneric names in brackets into the binomial.
This is going to cause big problems to anybody uploading batches of data from spreadsheets, if they use binomial names, as most beetle recorders do, because it will lead to large scale mismatches of taxon names when running the import wizard. It will also make RECORDER6 output incompatible with other systems such as ISIS without some tedious reformatting of names. I hope that this formatting quirk in the beetle species checklist can be corrected quickly in RECORDER6 to avoid a lot of frustration for people endeavouring to use the system in the future.
I can get round this problem for now with minimum waste of time, if I can get hold on an electronic version of the beetle checklist, formatted as in RECORDER6. I need to import this into a spreadsheet to construct a dictionary file for reformatting the species names in my data. It will take less than a minute to strip out the subgeneric names and link the resulting binomials with the originals.
Can anybody help me to get hold of such a checklist as I have failed to find a way to do this from my copy of RECORDER6 or from the on-line NBN species dictionary?Derek Lott
Now that we've got this super checklist in Recorder, Derek and his chums are key people to engage in Recorder recording.
I think I've managed to give Derek what he wanted (my brain wasn't working fully so Charles Roper kindly advised with the best methodology) so if I'm right Derek, who's a bit of a genius with spreadsheets, will be able to help his fellow Coleopterists out.
Derek's not likely to engage with this Forum so perhaps Charles Hussey of NHM would bring us up to date on this issue.