Accessions

An accession is a transaction that conveys an item, or (commonly) a group of items received from one source at one time, to an institution. As an administrative (rather than biological) entity, an accession can be delimited by administrative criteria such as previous title, applicable permits, or association with a particular project. In general, accessioning is the first step of incorporating items into a collection and indicates that the institution has accepted custody of (if not title to) the accessioned material. Accessioning generally precedes cataloging. Therefore, it is unnecessary to have individual item data in order to create an accession. Nevertheless, the nature and disposition of the items’ data should be recorded in order to assure that the data can eventually be located for purposes of cataloging.

Accessions share all transaction fields, in addition to the following.

transaction_id

Foreign Key —> transactions

accn_number

Accession Number is a text string assigned to identify the accession for a specific collection. Accession Number must be unique for the collection.

accn_type

Accession Type describes the means of acquisition. Foreign Key —> ctaccn_type

accn_status

Accession Status indicates status. Foreign Key —> ctaccn_status

received_date

Received Date is the ISO8601 date that the accessioned material was received by the institution.

estimated_count

Accession Estimated Count or “Est. Cnt.” is an integer expressing approximately how many items can be expected to be cataloged as part of an accession. Accession Containers are Containers which hold unprocessed material, e.g., bags of frozen mice can be made Containers and scanned into freezers. Email is sent on every annual anniversary of Transaction Data for accessions which are not “closed” but contain no cataloged items.

Data Entry Considerations

You can catalog records in “your collection” that have been accessioned by another collection. For data entry (through either the data-entry application or the bulkloader) indicate the accession that you wish to use, but put brackets around the part of the accession “number” that indicates the collection. This effectively tells the bulkloader, “ignore the collection to which this record is going to be appended, and indicate the accession based on what is in the brackets.” (Though that accession must be present in Arctos.) Examples include:

• A UAM Mammal Observation being entered into a UAM Mammal accession
• An MVZ Bird being entered into an MVZ Mammal accession
• An MSB parasite host being entered into an MSB parasite accession

Example Usage

• Desired accession: 1234.123.Mamm
• New Cataloged Item: UAMObs:Mamm 9876
• Default accession: UAMObs:Mamm 1234.123.Mamm (Does not and should not exist)

• Value to enter for Accession: [UAM:Mamm]1234.123.Mamm

• Desired accession: MVZ:Birds 14508
• New Cataloged Item: MVZ:Bird 183000 - Value to enter for Accession: 14508
• New Cataloged Item: MVZ:Mamm 250000 - Value to enter for Accession: [MVZ:Bird]14508

• New Cataloged Item: MVZObs:Bird 10 - Value to enter for Accession: [MVZ:Bird]14508

• Desired accession: MSB:Para 2012.123.Para
• New Cataloged Item: MSB:Host:9876
• Default accession: MSB:Host 2012.123 (Does not and should not exist)
• Value to enter for Accession: [MSB:Para]2012.123.Para

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