[Esip-sample-curation] Sample list tool?

[Mansur, Adam]

Hi all,

I was reading over the sample citation guidance and had a comment that was way too long for the Google Doc. The current draft gives the following guidance for documenting long lists of samples:
If your study uses many samples and would result in a prohibitively long list: create this table as a separate file, archive the table in an appropriate repository (such as Figshare, Zenodo, Dryad; or through institution- or domain-specific repositories), and link to the table.
These lists would ideally be machine-readable so that interested parties could easily find a sample or track sample usage, but it's not clear to me that the current guidance will allow this. The main drawbacks that I see are:

  *   Lists will use different formats and will not be validated, making it annoying to extract information from them
  *   List citations will use different formats and DOIs, potentially making them difficult to pick out of a paper
  *   Lists will be static and will not reflect changes in ownership or availability over time
  *   Lists will not be used consistently across papers

I'd like to think about building a tool to generate, store, and create DOIs for specimen lists instead. Lists would consist of only the most basic sample and ownership information (something like the DOI of the related publication plus the original sample identifiers, sample GUIDs, and owner information.) Where GUIDs with appropriate metadata are available (like at least some implementation of IGSNs), ownership information could be pulled in and updated. Since the data would all be in one place and linked to but not formally associated with a publication, it would also be possible to create and search sample lists for already published papers (for example, if an institution that has absorbed a collection would like to tag previously published papers that include those samples.) As with the current guidance, lists could be linked as references in new papers and the tool could supply a preferred citation to make them easier to find.

I know this would be one more thing to build and maintain in perpetuity, and I'm sure I'm underestimating the difficulty of implementing it, but I do think this kind of tool could be helpful for research collections especially.

Best,
Adam

Adam Mansur (he/him)
IT Specialist
Department of Mineral Sciences
w 202.633.1828  mansura at si.edu<mailto:mansura at si.edu>

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
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