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BG-BASE News

Note: the following text has been taken directly from the Fall 1997 issue of BG-BASE News (very green). No attempt has been made to reformat it for use on the web.

BG-BASE News Volume 5, Number 3

BG-BASE Users Swap Jobs

Rebecca Govier (Plant Records Officer, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, RBGE) and Kyle Port (Curatorial Assistant, Arnold Arboretum, AAH) exchanged jobs for several weeks this summer. Both Kyle and Rebecca are experienced record keepers and BG-BASE users in their own right, making for a smooth trans-Atlantic transition. However, while the two brought with them their home institution's philosophies, they both soon discovered that their summer hosts documented collections and used BG-BASE in different ways. For example:

Accessioning: At RBGE accessioning is the sole responsibility of the Plant Records Officer, while at AAH assigning accession numbers is a shared responsibility between the Senior Propagator and the Curatorial Assistant. Also, at AAH both the Horticultural Taxonomist and the Curatorial Assistant have responsibility for maintaining the NAMES file, while at RBGE the Plant Records Officer holds sole responsibility for this task.

Verification: At AAH the policy is to voucher and verify each accession on an ongoing basis. At RBGE material for verification is selected according to areas of specialization, such as a geographical area or specific genera. Expeditions, particular collectors and historically important collections are also prioritized for verification.

Use of qualifiers in the PLANTS file: While both AAH and RBGE use qualifiers to identify individual plants, AAH records a mass of plants of one accession by assigning as a qualifier the word MASS itself. At RBGE, MASS is recorded in the num.plts field while the qualifier is represented by a letter of the alphabet, similar to non-massed plants.

Images file: Over the last two years RBGE has dramatically increased the use of the IMAGES file, especially as the benefits of on-line imaging become apparent to more staff. Based on Kyle's involvement with this file at RBGE, it is anticipated that AAH will be using this feature much more in the future.

Both Kyle and Rebecca note that there is still much each institution can learn from each other. RBGE can certainly use as a benchmark the Arnold's high standards of living collections curation, while AAH can take its cue from RBGE in regards to the expansion of associate collections such as maintaining a slide library, scanning of images, bar-coding herbarium specimens, etc.

This scheme was masterminded by Steve Sponberg (AAH) and Crinan Alexander (RBGE), and it is hoped that other swaps will happen between other institutions that share a commitment to excellence in collections management.

(Editor's Note: Many thanks to both Rebecca and Kyle for their substantial comments.)

Advanced Training Seminars

The fourth U.S. BG-BASE Advanced Training Seminar was held at The Holden Arboretum on September 20-21, 1997. Participants included:

The next U.S. training seminar will be held April 26-27, 1998. Space is limited to five registrants and there is a registration fee. Contact Mike O'Neal at The Holden Arboretum for more information.

Recent installations

The Cloisters (August, 1997) BG-BASE will certainly find a new use here! The Cloisters, founded in 1938 in New York City, is a branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the architecture and art of medieval Europe. In addition to documenting the living collections, BG-BASE will also be used to record plants that are found in various works of art housed at the institution. For example, Cloisters staff would like to answer the question "Which works of art in the collection contain images or references to Lilium candidum". The works of art might include tapestries, paintings, or any other objects. These objects will be tracked via the data source (DS) file and then linked to the NAMES file. BG-BASE will also be used to record the overall significance of plants as they were used in medieval times, making extensive use of the special characteristics (SPEC.CHARS) and NAMES files. Data from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden were donated to The Cloisters and pre-loaded into their system.

West Indies Club Nursery (September, 1997) This private nursery in the Cayman Islands is an arm of the Cayman Shores Development Corporation. One of the nursery's primary tasks will be to provide native and endemic plant material for the various developments on the island. Ultimately, 170-180 species of palms and 450-500 species of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous material will be under cultivation and ready for use. The nursery will also be involved in various research projects leading to the development of a tropical nursery training program in conjunction with the University of West Indies. Extensive use of the horticultural task (HORT.TASKS) file within BG-BASE is underway, which allows nursery staff to track each task associated with a plant from start to finish. An initial set of data was provided to the nursery by neighboring Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park.

The Flora Conservanda Project

In one of our first newsletters (Fall 1993) we profiled the New England Wildflower Society (NEWF), mentioning that BG-BASE would be used to compile a list of the region's endangered flora. The future is here with the publication of:

Brumback, William E. and Leslie J. Mehrhoff. et. al. 1996 Flora Conservanda: New England. The New England Plant Conservation Program (NEPCoP) List of Plants in Need of Conservation. Rhodora 98(895):233-361.

The Flora Conservanda project was spearheaded by Bill Brumback, Conservation Director at NEWF (and local BG-BASE guru!) As the project was defined and as data were gathered during dozens of regional task force meetings throughout New England, various updates were made to BG-BASE. First and foremost, the project needed to be able to track taxa at national, regional, and state levels according to endangerment categories devised by the NEPCoP participants:

These categories were handled via the user-defined fields that are available in all of the major BG-BASE files. (For those of you not familiar with user-defined fields, these fields are designed to handle the specific data needs of an institution when those needs may not pertain to the larger BG-BASE community as a whole.)

Various additions were also made in BG-BASE to track both distribution and synonymy at the state level, as it was not unusual for NEPCoP participants to refer to the same plant under different names from state-to-state. Finally, output routines were designed to export the data in a format that was as close as possible to the final published work. This report was then sent to a word-processor for final editing.

For more information about the NEPCoP program, contact Bill Brumback, Conservation Director, Garden in the Woods, 150 Hemenway Road, Framingham, MA. 01701-2690 USA, email = brumback@newfs.org

Guest Column

Producing The RHS Plant Finder using BG-BASE. (Dr. Andrew Sier, Royal Horticultural Society, Wisley, UK)

The RHS Plant Finder is a publication whose aim is to provide a directory of plants commercially available in the United Kingdom. First published in 1987 by Chris Philip, it has evolved into a remarkable compilation, now including over 70,000 kinds of plants supplied by approximately 650 nurseries. The 1997/98 version of the RHS Plant Finder was produced using BG-BASE.

BG-BASE has been in use for several years at our Wisley location to manage the living and preserved collections. The process to produce The RHS Plant Finder via BG-BASE actually began in 1994 with the first of several electronic imports of data from the original Plant Finder database. Kerry Walter and RHS staff, particularly Niki Simpson, Kate Haywood, and Emma Cox, spent many hours standardizing the data during these import processes.

In April 1996, each nursery was then sent a list of plants by Plant Finder Administrator Clare Burgh that were listed in the previous years' book as supplied by that nursery. These lists were returned throughout the year, amended to show plants no longer supplied as well as indicating new plants that we were not aware of. This resulted in a very intense period of updating BG-BASE to reflect the most current information- over 300,000 records must be updated in a four-month period each year. Thankfully, through various programming and macro techniques, the update process was reduced to a mere two keystrokes per record.

The April 1996 survey also resulted in the creation of nearly 4000 new names in BG-BASE over a period of 3 months. These were carefully checked by Tony Lord, Editor of The RHS Plant Finder, and by RHS botanists. The RHS Advisory Panel of Nomenclature and Taxonomy also advised on entries made in the book. As such, The RHS Plant Finder now serves as a valuable reference work for horticultural nomenclature and as a means of stabilizing names of cultivated plants.

After the survey results were entered another round of intense editing commenced. Most of this time was spent making corrections to existing records, removing duplicates, and sorting out problems with synonymy. Throughout we had to ensure that the data were accurate and consistent, and that all of the proper links between names and nurseries were maintained. Finally the time came to "push the button" to generate the book! Various output routines were designed by Kerry Walter to export the pertinent data into rich text format (RTF) and ASCII, which was then imported into either Microsoft Word 7 or Microsoft Excel to generate the final text, indexes, table-of-contents, etc.

The end result of this project is a modified version of BG-BASE that we believe will be of benefit to other users of the system as well. The NAMES file underwent extensive modification to cope with names conforming to either the "botanical code" or "horticultural code" of nomenclature, including the often-confusing use of trademark names. Additional files were added to track commercial nurseries and which plants were supplied by each nursery. We have also tried to maintain accurate and complete synonym links as well, thus enriching the database.

By opting to use BG-BASE for the task of producing The RHS Plant Finder, all data have been kept on a single database at the Royal Horticultural Society. Hence, the huge task of editing our NAMES file, now numbering 102,500 records, has benefitted our Plant Records office, Herbarium Keeper, Horticultural Advisers, and all others at the RHS that rely on such data. Because the RHS Plant Finder is an annual publication, all of the nomenclatural data held in BG-BASE will continue to be kept up to date, thus reflecting the RHS's current views on cultivated plant nomenclature.

[Editor's Note: See the RHS home page, www.rhs.org.uk, for further information about the RHS Plant Finder and other aspects of the Society.]

1998 BG-BASE Users Meeting

The 8th annual BG-BASE users meeting will be held in Philadelphia the week of June 17-21,1998, in conjunction with the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AABGA) annual conference. Plan now -- see you there!