Locality Documentation

How To Assign a New Locality to a Catalog Record

In some cases, editing a locality for a cataloged item may not be the best course of action. This may be because the locality itself is correct and the cataloged item has been improperly attributed to it. Alternatively, you may wish to clean up duplicate entries by consolidating them. In these situations, it is more efficient to reassign these cataloged items to a preexisting or a new locality. The first half of this tutorial will teach you how to reassign cataloged items to a new locality, if your cataloged item(s) is/are assigned to one collecting event only. If you only want to reassign one cataloged item that is part of a collecting events with other cataloged items into a new locality, please refer to the second half of this tutorial.

• From the cataloged item page, click on the “Locality” link as previously done to edit localities. Instead of focusing on the Locality information, look at the section on the bottom left titled Collecting Event.

• In Arctos, cataloged items are tied to events, which are themselves tied to localities. In order to assign a cataloged item to a new locality, then, you will have to edit the event. Click “Edit Event” to proceed.

• Clicking that button will bring you, as expected, to the Edit Event page. This page records the date of the event and the locality where it occurred. For now, you will only be concerned about locality, which is found in the bottom right. Click on the gray-green button labelled “Pick New Locality for this Collecting Event”.

• A new window will open containing a form to search for a locality. If you were to use this form to execute a search, the most useful fields would be Specific Locality, DecLat, and DecLong. A more exact way, however, would be to have the desired locality opened in another tab. From there, you can simply copy the Locality ID at the top of the page and paste it directly into the field.

• Click “Find Matches” at the bottom of the form to return your results, then click “Accept” on the proper locality. Doing so will reassign the event to that locality.

• After clicking “Accept” the popup window will close without any major changes. Although it may look as if nothing happened, there is a new red box indicating that you have in fact selected a new locality. If you also need to change the Verbatim Locality, you can type it in manually. Click “Save” to finalize these changes.

Unfortunately, the steps above do not address the possibility that your cataloged item of interest may be in a collecting event that contains multiple cataloged items. The steps above only list how to edit an event under which the cataloged item was located. What if you only want to change the locality of one cataloged item without changing the locality of other cataloged items that share the same collecting event as your cataloged item of interest? There is a slightly complicated method to do so, but it is possible.

• Go the locality edit page (you can access it by searching your cataloged item, clicking the locality tab, and choosing to edit the locality). Create a new locality by clicking “clone locality” at the bottom of the page. This is the one you will edit given the extra information you received. Make sure to keep track of the new locality number as well as the old locality number.

• Go to the page where you edit the collecting event and “clone collecting event” then input the new locality info into this cloned collecting event as described in the section above. Make sure you keep track of both the new collecting event number and the original collecting event number.

• Return to the locality tab of your cataloged item page. Under the rectangle marked “This Collecting Event (ID# of the event) contains…”, select the cataloged item type (birds, mammals, or herps), under which your cataloged item falls.

• Check all other cataloged items in the results page except for yours, and under the “Tools” tab hit “Remove Checked Rows”. This will eliminate all other cataloged items from the Results page except for the one whose locality you want to edit.

• In your results page, you now only have your cataloged item of interest. Under the “Manage” tab of the results page, click “Collecting Events”.

• Near the bottom of the page, click the orange button “REMOVE all specimen events (presumably so you can add new ones)”.

• Return to the Locality tab of your cataloged item page. Click the grey “pick new event” button, and input the new Locality ID# into the “Locality ID” slot. Select this new locality, and click save. Your cataloged item will now have been assigned to the new locality. Since you previously created a newly collecting event and assigned it to this locality, your cataloged item should also be assigned to this new collecting event. (Note: this was a very complex process, please doublecheck the methodology and go through it yourself to make sure it makes sense).

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