Specimen Barcode and Labeling Guide: Difference between revisions

A lot of the same concerns related to barcode labels (e.g., what's printed, the label paper and ink, overall robustness, and conservation issues) applies to specimen labeling. Your institution may have some provenance or archive guidelines for what specimen labels should include. Common sense says a label should include at a minimum taxon identification, who collected it, their field or collection number, when it was collected, locality description, institution name and code, accession/catalog number. Other very useful additions might be habitat description, lat and lon, and phenology. Below you will find some specimen label examples kindly offered by the survey respondents. Modern practices suggest that this information is generated in the field and conveyed electronically to the institutional database when the specimens are digitized (imaged and accessioned into the collection), ensuring that no errors are introduced by re-entering. Barcoding can also occur in the field.