Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 08/20/2007 - 14:34
Forums
Kuril Islands Biocomplexity

Approximately how many errors in your field notes, samples, etc., did you find as you did the final catalogs at the museum?

 

C. Baird

Tue, 08/21/2007 - 08:21

Misty Nikula

Chuck Well, we didn't keep an exact count - but ... some of the errors were with transcription of the catalog into the computer some were with the sorting of the bags at the museum when we checked things in, we caught many of those.
Yesterday, we sub-bagged items by ID number into gallon bags, then loaded those into coolers, etc. That made it very easy to track down and locate the odd "lithic tool" that mistakenly got packed. I simply wrote the ID #, the bag # and the cooler number on a slip and gave it to Colby and Mike to track down. Many of those were bags where we had read the ID number off the bag incorrectly and so it was easily fixed when we looked at the metal tag inside.
Redundancy of counting and labeling was the key!
I would guess that, given that we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 samples (both archy and geo), that there was less than 3% error from site to final destination (so far - they aren't to the US, yet - we try to pass the first part of that hurdle, customs inspector, today). Misty