Computerised Herbarium Records

A considerable amount of work has been done in the computerisation of the Herbarium records over the last few years. At present about 10% of the general collection of sheets is available internally for searching, together with all of the Fern sheets.

The work has been done using FoxPro 2.0 for the databases, and some progress has been made in accessing the records both by FoxPro 2.0 programs and by programs written in Visual Basic 3.0.

So far there has been no special funding for this work. Further progress is not likely to be made without proper funding for the considerable work involved in entering the rest of the collections (approximately 45,000 sheets) into the database.

The structure of the fern database, similar to that of the main collection one, is given below:

Number of data records:    2380
Date of last update   : 02/12/1994
Memo file block size  :      64

Field  Field Name  Type       Width    Dec    Index
1  FAMILY      Character     24            
2  SUBGENUS    Character     19            
3  GENUS       Character     19            
4  GENUSNO     Character      3            Asc
5  SPECIES     Character     17            
6  REF         Character     41            
7  LOCALITY    Memo          10            
8  COLLECTOR   Character     52            
9  COLLNO      Character      5            
10  HERBTRIN    Character      5            
11  HABITAT     Memo          10            
12  SPORING     Logical        1            
13  DATE        Date           8            
14  NOTES       Memo          10            
15  ALTITUDE    Character     13            
16  EAST        Character      3            
17  NORTH       Character      3            
** Total **                     244

This database is approximately 0.9Mb, including both the .dbf file(580K) and the .fpt file(320K) which contains the Memo fields (LOCALITY, HABITAT, and NOTES).

Accessing the Computer Databases

A number of programs written in FoxPro allow the data in the databases to be accessed in various ways. For example:

By area -

by entering latitude and longitude co-ordinates all species in a 4 kilometer square centred on this point may be listed.

By species -

by entering a species name all sheets of that species will be mapped.

The following illustration shows a screen-shot from a species-mapping program written for the Fern Database in Visual Basic 3.0. Click on the thumb-nail for the actual full-size picture.