We had the same concerns over adding a new determination as part of verification - being named as determiner on a record they hadn't personally identified understandably wasn't popular as an idea with our verifiers. We implemented the last approach with the help of Mike last year but amend the existing determination rather than create a new one.

We use a batch update to change the determination type to "considered correct" but retaining the original determiner and determination date, and appends a suitable determination comment to any existing determination comment, e.g. [Verified Cumbria moth referee NAME DATE]. There is a 100 character limit on the determination comment. This is done using a spreadsheet containing three fields - the taxon observation key of each record, the determination type and the verifier's comments. Any records that are not "considered correct" in the determination type field are ignored so we can go and add new determinations to these manually. I'm really happy with the results - it is much easier to work out the verification status of our recent records now and over time we hope to get to the stage that all records in the database will have such a metadata trail for verification.

We'd be happy to share the batch update but it would need Mike's permission.

Thank you both for all of that useful information.  Really helpful to hear others' thoughts and approaches used.

I like the approach referred to by Teresa to keep the original determination information where the verification agrees with it and append the verification comment.  Particularly from a point of view of trying to include maximum information within an export type layout in the absence of separate verification fields, where not everything that's in Recorder is visible.

Where custodianship of a record is not held, is there a way to 'pull through' the information from the original determination to create the same effect but within the necessary new determination?  Or could the batch update be amended to always retain the original determination, but also create a duplicate as a new determination, in which the determination type is amended and verification comment appended?

Have you ever had the situation of records being reverified?  We are thinking about running records through the NBN Record Cleaner en masse as an 'initial sweep' and relatively quick way of achieving improvement in quality, but with a view to gradually enlisting the help of County Recorders and other human expert verifiers to take a look.  The reasoning being that they can use local knowledge, flexibility, etc. that standardised national rules cannot.  Sometimes the verifier may only wish to or have time to look at the 'failed' records that require further investigation, but others like to see the full dataset.  A record could therefore end up being verified by both the Record Cleaner and the expert.  Presumably running the batch update again would append any further verification onto the existing extended comment (character limit permitting)?  Though perhaps once you have the human verification, the NBN Record Cleaner comment may be surplus to requirement and it would be more desirable to be able to just append the comment to the original determination comment without the 'intermediate' stage?

Linds

I thought the standard update created an entirely new determination based on what you enter in an Excel file rather than automatically using information from the existing determination?  Or have I misunderstood?

What I'm thinking of is a way to achieve a result similar to what Teresa describes but in a new determination (i.e. same determination date and determiner as the original determination, but verification comment appended to original determination comment).  Would we do this by entering this original information into the Excel file to be used to create the new determination and concatenating the original comment with any verification comment we want to append into the field that will create the new determination comment?  Or is there a better way?

Thanks for your help,
Linds

Great - thanks for the clarification Mike.

Teresa - please could we take up your offer of sharing the batch update you described?

Many thanks both,
Linds