April 2015

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History recently registered nearly 350,000 samples with IGSNs in SESAR², including specimens from the National Gem, National Mineral, and National Rock Collections. The inclusion of these samples in SESAR² greatly enhances the discoverability of these valuable collections*. Furthermore, since data exists for many of these samples in PetDB, the IGSNs can now be added and used to link samples to analyses in different publications regardless of sample naming conventions of individual authors. Click here to view an example sample profile in SESAR², including a link to the Smithsonian Collections web pages. To view all samples, search the catalog for samples beginning with the user code (namespace) ‘NHB’.

These registrations took advantage of the SESAR² Web Services, which are documented here.

*Please note that the use of IGSNs in publications, alone, does not fulfill the Smithsonian loan policy stating that samples must be referenced by museum catalog numbers. Authors should include both museum catalog numbers and IGSNs.