Projects

Projects are primarily endeavors that contribute specimens, use specimens, or both, but also serve as a convenient place to arbitrarily group things like Media and Publications. Dissertations and expeditions are two examples of potential projects. Because information about incoming specimens is recorded as accessions, and because information about specimen usage is recorded as loans, relationships between projects can be queried. Project descriptions, and their relationships to specimens and publications, are intended to:

Projects can be created retroactively in order to reflect the historic usage or origin of specimens, or projects can be created in the process of requesting a loan or describing an incoming accession. A project has a title, a description, a start date, an end date, and participating agents who have roles. Projects may also produce publications to which they can be related even in the absence of specimen citations. (Capturing some information - e.g., that derived from loans or personal knowledge - about poor-quality Citations is a core function of Projects.)

Project

Project is the core table.

Title

Like projects themselves, project titles may be composed retrospectively or they may originate from the participants. Titles should avoid jargon and be understandable to non-specialists, such as educated taxpayers. Titles should be self-explanatory, stand alone, and contain enough information for a user to decide whether to investigate further or not. In format, project titles are like journal article and book chapter titles. Recommended format is to capitalize only the first letter of the title and proper names, and punctuate the end of the title with a period unless it is otherwise punctuated. Markdown in project_name is supported, but not recommended as it will inhibit searching. HTML is not allowed.

Description

Description is an abstract of one to about ten sentences. Description should demonstrate the importance of the work and justify the use of museum specimens and resources. Vocabulary and grammar must be suitable for public display. New projects requesting use of specimens should include such descriptions as part of their requests. Markdown is acceptable in .project_description. HTML is not allowed.

Dates

start_date and end_date will often be approximate, and End Date can be ignored for projects that are active. Often, the date that a request for specimens is received is used as the start date, and the date that results are last published is used as the end date.

Funded USD

funded_usd is the amount, in US Dollars, for which a project has been funded.

Remarks

project_remarks is a project-centered free-text field. Neither markdown nor HTML are supported.

Agents

Project Agents (table project_agent) are the people or agencies doing the project. Their names are drawn from the agent table and must be entered there if they are not already in the database.

Agent Roles

project_agent_role describes what the agents do as project participants. The values for this field are controlled by a code table.

Agent Order

agent_position is the order in which the agents will be displayed. A principal investigator would usually be number one followed by co-investigators. In the case of a doctoral thesis or dissertation, the student is usually first and the major advisor second, though this could be an issue of some delicacy.

Award

award_number and funded_usd (may only be associated with role Sponsor) links specific funding to project participants.

Agent Dates

start_date and end_date specify temporal participation.

Publications

A project may be directly associated with any number of Publications. This functionality is primarily intended to capture low-quality Citations; it is not necessary to explicitly add Publications which specifically cite material included in project transactions. This table contains keys to projects and publications, plus a remarks field (in which eg assumptions made to guess at poor citations should be noted).

project_publication_remarks

Free-text, no markup/markdown.

Taxonomy

Taxon names may be linked directly to projects via table project_taxonomy.

Transactions

Table project_trans links projects to transactions. This link is where the magic happens - accessioning a record under one project and (perhaps decades) later citing the same record under another automatically provides attribution to the original collectors, for example. This table contains keys to projects and publications, plus a remarks field.

Project Trans Remarks

project_trans_remarks

Free-text, no markup/markdown.

Media

Media may be attached to Projects via media relationships.

Deleting

To delete a project, first delete all dependencies then a delete button will appear.

Identifier

Each project generates a unique identifier and URI comprised of its internal project ID. Example: {base URL}/project/{projectID} such as: https://arctos.database.museum/project/10000298

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