The locality model in Arctos is tricky and great care is needed when editing. When you edit either a collecting event (which holds date and habitat info), or a locality (coordinates, description, elevation) you may be affecting many other specimen records, which may belong to other collections.
SPECIMEN_RECORD ----> COLLECTING_EVENT ----> LOCALITY
n 1 n 1
E.g., adding elevation to a locality
- From a specimen record, click Edit in the Place and Time panel. In the subsequent popup, the Event info is on the left and the Locality info is on the right.
- In the red box, click on ‘xxx catalog records’ and review the records that will be affected by your edit. Confirm that you indeed want to edit all of them.
- Click ‘Edit Locality’ and make the edits required (e.g., adding min elev., max elev, and ‘m’).
- Return to the catalog record and confirm the edit is as desired.
Unless you are very confident you know what you are doing, do not use the Bulk Edit Locality Tool, because this tool may unintentionally affect thousands of records that are not yours. The safer way to modify locality is via the Record Event Loader. This will create a new locality for each GUID. If several are part of the same Event (same time, same place), the multiple new localities and events will be collapsed into a single event and locality by the daily Arctos clean-up scripts.
- Save all the existing Event and Locality data into a file using either a SQL script, or the main Arctos search with the “[Tools] -> Download -> For Record Bulkloader”
- Edit the fields until they match the fields in the
Record Event Loader. Generally you will want:
guid
specimen_event_type
assigned_by_agent
assigned_date
collecting_method
collecting_source
habitat
verbatim_date
verbatim_locality
began_date
ended_date
primary_spatial_data
= “point-radius”orig_lat_long_units
datum
max_error_distance
max_error_units
georeference_protocol
dec_lat
dec_long
spec_locality
orig_elev_units
minimum_elevation
maximum_elevation
higher_geog
- If you are adding data (e.g. elevation), insert the correct values into the upload file at this time.
- Upload CSV into the bulkloader (remember, the line endings must be
‘Mac’, i.e.,
\r
) - Review, set status to load, load, wait
- Check that the updated data now appears for the records you wanted to edit.
- NOTE: this tool will add a new collecting event. The original one will still be there, in a gray box. The only way to delete this is manually, one-by-one. Because of this, the one-by-one edit method (above) is generally recommended.