Complex Locality Question | Indigenous Localities | Search Feature Question | Printing Labels

[Digitization-RBG-HAM]

Hello Community,

We have a four-part question that is all related

Southern Ontario is constantly going through municipal/geographic changes. As we enter older collections into the database we will have an entry as follows:

Region of Hamilton Wentworth
Town of Flamborough
Lot 4 and 5 Conc IV
Wetland 99-4 North of Waterdown
UTM NU 892 002

Some major issues arise from entering this data into the CNH portal. First is that there is no longer a Town of Flamborough. Nor is there a region of Hamilton Wentworth. Waterdown is also now Hamilton. So everything has been consolidated into a larger geographic region but there is important and specific historical location information we don't want to lose. Even the UTM coordinates need a lot of interpretation.

Thus if we look at modern geographic organization, all that great locality info would be turned into:
[Country] Canada, [State/Province] Ontario, [County] Hamilton, [Municipality] Hamilton, City of. None of that would give an accurate idea of the specimen locality. It's too broad. Yet many people don't know what to search for when it comes to areas that no-longer exist. We can add some of the finer points to the [Locality] field, but then the following problem occurs:

We want to enter from largest to smallest geographic region. If I input:
[Country] Canada, [State/Province] Ontario, [County] Hamilton, [Municipality] Hamilton, City of
Then in [Locality] input to save historical information:
Region of Hamilton Wentworth, Town of Flamborough, Lot 4 and 5 Conc IV, Wetland 99-4 North of Waterdown

What is returned is a label both for online viewing and for printing that is essentially showing two localities. Even though both localities are correct.

I could cut out the "Region of Hamilton Wentworth, Town of Flamborough" but those are on the label and important to the identification of where the specimen was originally located.

I know what you are thinking. "Why not just input the original locality details in the fields and be done with it?"

Well because of the problem with searching.

There doesn't seem to be a general location search field that would return search entries with your search term from any of the location fields under "locality". So if I search "Hamilton" under "Locality Criteria" in a text-based search, I can't even search it as a municipality. Results for "Hamilton" in [Locality] or [County] bring back completely different searches and many with "Hamilton" in the municipality field are just missing while the [County] field only has a small number of search returns because Hamilton has only been recently designated at a Geographic Area = County.

**Questions:

1. How do you deal with complex and often changing geographic information that needs to be linked to modern norms? What would you do in our case?
2. How can we get a search in the portal that will return the word "Hamilton" (or whatever) from all Locality Fields? Where would you enter it?
3. We want to include Indigenous land and locality information as well. How would the community suggest doing that in addition to the European structure?
4. How would you get the locality information accurate and then print labels that are closely resembling the original labels in digital form?**

I have suggestions and will also post these in the appropriate section.
For Numbers 1 & 3: Create a section of the database much like the [Determination History] tab but for location history. You could have it be a copy of the [Locality] section but have a check box for "Make this the Historical Locality", one for "make this the Modern Locality" and one for "Make this the Indigenous Locality"

In each you could have a more generalized field that states to enter data from largest to smallest geographic area, much like the [Locality] field under the Locality Section separated by comma or vertical space bar.

For Number 2: Adapt the database portal to include a broad locality search. Add another search field to resolve the problems searching noted above.

For Number 4: Add selection options for what to print on the label with perhaps a Historical, Modern, and Indigenous location section. I personally would want all 3 on my label much like I'd want all the annotation information.

Related: There is a lot of conflict in the world today and in the past. Whole communities and areas Indigenous and otherwise are wiped out and all we have are historical maps of what used to be. In more peaceful areas governments are constantly changing geographic information. Now that we are digitizing collections around the world it seems like having options to connect older locality information to new and respecting Treaties makes a lot of sense moving forward and is a problem that digitizing and databasing is perfect for solving by saving a record of that change associated with the plant.

Obviously geo-referencing can be a huge help here, but in the next 100 to 200 years how will the standard change? Keeping excellent locality records connecting the dots to back-up geo-referenced specimens can only help, especially as we try and get all the older collections digitized and hire people to work on the geo-referencing of collections.