Odd recorder names

[welshofficer]

I have discovered some records made by myself and one other person, and entered into MapMate by a third party (the relevant VC recorder) where the recorder has been listed rather oddly.

It should be Spencer-Vellacott, P. and Jones, R.A.

However, at some stage it has become Jones, P., Jones, Spencer-Vellacott and Jones, R.A. I guess this probably doesn't look like that in MapMate, presumably a strange import glitch as the DDB attempts to separate multiple recorders?

I have (hopefully) edited Jones, Spencer-Vellacott to Spencer-Vellacott, Polly - I hope this is acceptable - but not sure how to delete Jones, P. (who doesn't exist) - when I try to edit a record it looks much more sensible!

Any advice?

[welshofficer]

I also thought it might be helpful to merge different instances of the same recorder (obviously where there is a high degree of confidence in this) - for example, Spencer-Vellacott, P. and Spencer-Vellacott, Polly - or several Spencer, A.G. instances. I found that if I click on a "person" and then "related records" it should be an option, but got a message saying the server did not respond, or similar. Should this be possible? I also noticed that there appear to be some recorders with no records - for example there are 3 different Spencer, G. instances, but only one of the three appears to be associated with any records.

[admin]

There is a fairly widespread problems with mangled recorder name combinations. This mostly affects records imported from mapmate. Unfortunately the database has been poor at coping with recorder name entries that consist of a list of multiple people.

The system tries to split up the names, but often gets this wrong, resulting in the weird combinations that Polly and several over people have noted.

Internally the database still has a copy of the original uncorrupted version of the records. I hope that it will soon be possible to use this to regenerate the names correctly. Meanwhile please don't be tempted to try to manually correct the afflicted records.

Sorry about all the errors with recorder and determiner names, these will be corrected soon.

Tom


Tom Humphrey
BSBI Database Officer


tomhumphrey@gmail.com