Re: What have you done to my recording cards?
Following the upgrade to 6.14 we have noticed a rather annoying and unexpected change to the way recording cards work.
We have a long established paper recording form for use by field surveyors which lists the 400 plant taxa most commonly recorded on the county's Wildlife Sites. The order of the taxa on this form is loosely based on the taxonomic ordering from Recorder 3. That is to say that it first lists around 100 monocots (in alphabetical order), then a few hundred dicots (also in alphabetical order), then conifers, ferns, horsetails & mosses.
When we started using Rec 6 we created a rucksack with the 400 species, in the order in which they appear on the form and successfully built a recording card which had the species listed in the same order, allowing fast and precise data entry in a single pass.
Following the recent upgrade we noticed that although the rucksack is still ordered correctly, the recording card now lists species in a completely different order. The new order is neither alphabetical nor taxonomic (it starts with ferns, then some, but not all of the conifers etc.) In order to use the form the operator now has either to ferret about in the recording card to locate the correct taxon, or re-sort the card so that all species are listed alphabetically with no separation of taxonomic groups, meaning that the user now has to scroll through the recording form in four or five passes to cover each group in turn.
This is hardly the end of the world, but data entry is depressing enough without all this messing about. Do I now have to redesign the recording form to put all species in alphabetical order and annoy the field workers instead?
Any suggestions?
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre