Apologies for taking up this thread rather late in the day. We’ve been discussing these topics recently in Glasgow, so I’m pleased to see some enlightening input from elsewhere. However, I think there is still a need for some further thinking – which I hope to stimulate.

Determination Type: this field already exists in ‘standard’ R6, with values such as ‘invalid’, ‘unconfirmed’. This in turn relates to another major topic – that of Verification / Validation – which doesn’t seem to have been fully resolved yet. I do agree it would be useful to have an additional field for ‘how the record was identified’.

I also agree that Sampling Method should be a technique of some kind; but, given that
John is suggesting that most of Charles’ suggested Record Types are actually Determination Types, surely the Record Type would then be the ‘nature of the record itself’ – eg from a card-index, a publication, a field notebook - rather than the ‘nature of the object recorded’?

To my mind the categories that John suggests as Record Types are a mixture of Measurement Qualifiers (track, seed, pellet) – ie ‘ the nature of the object recorded’ - and Sampling Methods (olfactory). The reason I say this is that the ‘core’ MQs are categories like Adult, Male, Female – ‘things you can count’ -and I’d argue that roadkill, flying etc belong to a different set of concepts which I wouldn’t think of as measurements.

I’ve always had a problem with roadkill / dead on road – or even simply ‘dead’; I’m aware that this can be thought of as a ‘sex/stage’ category, but you’d still need to specify which sex/stage it was that you’d recorded, so it wouldn’t seem be the appropriate MQ. It could just about be a Sample Method, but my inclination is to put it in as a Comment – and if there was likely to be a need to produce a report on road-kills, then it would seem easiest to set up a dedicated Survey.

I am aware that the Measurement fields have been used by individual users for a variety of individual purposes, and therefore a general definition of what Measurement Qualifiers ‘are’ could well be impossible (or unhelpfully vague) at this stage, but I think a definition of what they – and the other concepts under discussion - ‘should be’ would nonetheless be helpful.

This all dates back of course to Recorder 3, which had a mixture of what we are now calling ‘methods’ and ‘type of thing’ in the ‘Record Type’ field. So those of us who imported data using the R3 import Add-in are already in muddy waters. And the various approaches taken by different users seem to have contributed further murkiness – particularly when records have been exchanged using the export routines. So even though these issues may be clarified, I think it’s very doubtful that there could ever be a general method for bringing existing records into line.

I think I mentioned when Recorder 2000 came out that it was a pity there wasn’t a document that outlined what the various fields are ‘for’ – and there’s apparently still a need for this judging by this and other threads on this forum.