Unique identifiers in FoTX are displayed at the top of each specimen page and included in the url. By default, they are a combination of a letter-based acronym or codon representing the data originator (for specimens, this is a museum collection) followed by a numeric catalog number unique to the originator (sometimes letters or other characters are included). The two are separated by an underscore ("_") starting in Version 3 (Version 1.0 and 2.0 lacked underscores). The numbers correspond to unique museum lots, which are typically a jar of specimens of a single species collected by a group of collectors at a particular location and date. The codon usually conforms to ASIH standards (Sebaj, 2020), but see here for a list of all of our donor codons. See the example below:

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FoTX unique identifier for a split lot (i.e., TNHC_1234 is discovered to have multiple species): TNHC_1234(1), TNHC_1234(2), TNHC_1234(3), etc.

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Records Lacking Unique Identifiers

In some cases, the identifiers we received from our donors were not unique. This is exceedingly rare among the museum data since museums have universally implemented uniqueness among catalog numbers. But, for other sources of data this is not uncommon. Since our database schema requires that identifiers be unique, we add a parenthetical sequential suffix  suffix with the text "_(donor_dup[#])" ensuring they are. For example:

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