To collect does not merely mean to accumulate possessions. Collecting means expanding your knowledge of certain objects and making these things, and information about them, available to yourself and others.
Whether alone or as part of a community, whether as a hobby or as a scientist, collection management needs to be a useful tool for you to administer the objects you collect and for exchanges with other collectors and scientists.
We want to share the fun of collecting with others and thus make collecting ever more attractive.
It starts with the collection. You give it a name and thereby establish a “virtual museum” for your collected specimens. You can have more than one of these virtual collections.
Then follows the exhibit or collection item, which starts out as just an ID, a combination of numbers and letters that helps to identify the exhibit forever. In our case the ID has 22 digits and is a unique identifier worldwide. We will go into this in more detail later. You can print out labels for the initial inscription before the collection objects are recorded.
In addition to the unique ID, the locality of the find is very important in our geological context, so this is also queried in the first step. Almost any other information can be retrieved later if necessary and can also be entered later.
Further data (like properties) give more life to the specimen. A wide variety of programmed dialogues help with this - like fitting pieces of a puzzle together, only more easily. No matter whether analysis results are entered as a photo or a pdf; whether the object is a mineral, fossil or rock; whether labels need to be printed; events such as discovery, exchange, purchase, loan, etc. need to be recorded, everything can be managed.
Perhaps you are asking yourself why we use a 22-character sequence of digits and letters for our collection identifiers?
It has been a longstanding problem that collection items lose their “identity” because their names and collection numbers change when a specimen moves from one collection to the next. The ID used here enables permanent use as it is unique worldwide. No central registration office is required to assign the number - It happens on your own premises in your collection management.
This number provides a central link for collectors and researchers in order to be able to build on previously collected data when working on a collection item.
This collection management program is designed so that objects and their associated information can be passed on between collections, collectors and institutions and thus ensure that the history of a specimen remain as complete and free of gaps as possible.
The ID is based on the “Globally Unique Identifier” and is derived from it and can also be converted into this.