We are becoming rather frustrated at the inflexibility of the higher security access levels in Recorder and feel that there should be more discrimination possible at the Full Edit level (for our purposes Full Edit own records only is more or less useless).

Lots of different issues have presented themselves, but the current one is as follows: We have an absolute requirement that no data marked as confidential will be passed beyond the walls of the LRC. Easily done since we can set the minimum access level which is allowed to export such data to system administrator (that is just the two full time staff here).

The problem is that there are a number of useful items in the tools menu which are only available to system administrators. The most important to our mind is the Merge data items tool.

The process of migrating our data to Rec 6 has created a mass of duplicated data. Our sites data all came from recorder 3 and the migration process created a new survey event for every unique combination of date, location and recorders, but also created a new event for every event in the Rec3 EVENTS table. Consequently for all the data which came from Rec3, almost every event is duplicated (thousands of them).

Since then we have imported many other datasets from several different databases (100,000s of records) and there has almost inevitably been massive duplication of recorders' names. Some very active recorders may occur five or six times in the Individual table. This problem was probably exacerbated by the import wizard (which thankfully seems much better in the new version).

There is no way we can devote the staff time to a systematic search and destroy mission on these duplicates, the only solution is to accept the duplication for now, but mobilise all available staff to merge them as and when they are noticed. But this means we have to give all staff system administrator access privileges forever, risking the accidental release of confidental data (or continually be switching them from one access level to another).

Is there any way that we can get under the bonnet and allow the merge tool to be useable at Full Edit level. I am quite happy that our staff can be trained to operate the tool without risking data loss.

There is a related problem at the lower end of the Full Edit level. Most of our field data is entered by staff via a recording card, then we have a trusted volunteer whose job is to double check the data entered against the original recording form, ticking the check-boxes next to each record as he goes. For this mundane and trivial task he needs to have full edit access, giving him the opportunity to work all manner of chaos as he goes (should he wish to do so). I guess it should be possible to grant him specific update access to the TAXON_OCCURRANCE table, but would this override the fact that his login will be in one of the lower SQL-server security roles?