Catalogue a backlog in a weekend

1. Decide the numbering scheme before you touch a specimen: prefix, optional locality code, padded sequence (see Numbering schemes). Set it in Stratum's accession settings so every new record gets the next number automatically.

2. Set up one station: a table with a neutral cloth, a lamp, a printed scale bar, a pot of micro labels or a pen and rag-paper slips, and your phone on a stand. Everything passes through it in one direction — unrecorded on the left, recorded on the right.

3. Triage first, do not catalogue first. Spend the first hour sorting boxes into three piles: pieces with a label or a known locality, pieces you can identify but whose locality is lost, and pieces that are neither. The first pile is the collection; the second is décor with a note; the third is a teaching drawer or a giveaway.

4. For each piece in the first pile: photograph it with the scale bar (one overall, one detail), create the record with the Field capture or the quick-add sheet, type the label exactly as written (old labels are evidence — do not correct them), photograph the label into the vault, then write the new number on the piece and put the old label and the new micro label in its tray.

5. Fill only the fields you can defend: identification to the level you are sure of (genus, or “trilobite” if that is all), formation if the label says so, locality, source and date. Leave the rest blank; blank is honest and searchable, a guess is neither.

6. Batch what repeats. Twenty Green River fish from one purchase share formation, locality, source and date: create the first record fully, duplicate it, and change the number and the photo. A lot bought as one purchase is one acquisition event with many specimens.

7. Stop at the end of day one and back up. Day two is the second pile and the labels: print the drawer and tray labels for what you recorded, re-house anything in oak or cardboard, and note the storage location on each record so the database knows which drawer.

8. What you did not finish goes back in a box marked with the date and “not catalogued”. A weekend gets most collections to the point where the next piece takes five minutes, and that is the habit that keeps the backlog from returning.