BF Workbench is a restricted scientific system. Records are available only to registered, authorised accounts.

Institutions

Adding, editing and merging institutions.

How-to

The Institutions page, under Controlled Terms in Platform Management, holds the list of organisations that the platform refers to: the laboratories, museums, herbaria and agencies that hold specimens, employ people and run projects. Because so much refers to this list, it is kept as a controlled vocabulary that only administrators edit. This page covers how institutions are used, and how to add, edit and merge them.

How institutions are used

An institution is one row that many things point to by reference, so renaming it once changes the name everywhere it is shown.

  • Specimen records carry the institution in their inst field, and specimen details can also name a biobank institution and a collector's affiliation.
  • People have an affiliation. In the User Profile dialog, the Institution field suggests names from this list after three characters, and text that matches no listed institution is discarded on save. The same applies when you edit a user's details from the Users page: the name must match exactly or the field is cleared.
  • Projects and sequence records can name an institution as their site.
  • Institutions themselves can point to a parent institution.

The practical consequence is that a user cannot affiliate themselves with an organisation you have not added. Add the institution first, then tell the user to pick it.

The list

Each row shows the institution with its code, and the counts above the list tell you how many institutions have a country, a contact and a website recorded. Search matches name and code. Open a row to see its full details.

Add an institution

  1. Choose the + button.
  2. Enter a Name and a Code. Both are required, and the code must be unique on the platform; a duplicate is refused.
  3. Optionally add a Code Alias, Address, Phone, Website, and a Contact Person with their Email.
  4. Save.

The code is the short identifier that appears next to the name in lists. Choose it with care, because it is what specimens and people are matched against when data is loaded.

Edit an institution

Open the institution and choose edit. Every field from the add dialog can be changed. Edits are made in place: records that already refer to the institution keep their link and simply show the new values. Keep the same code unless you intend to relabel the institution everywhere it is used.

Limit: Country is shown on an institution but cannot be set or changed from this page.

Merge institutions

Institutions cannot simply be deleted, because records refer to them. Instead, deleting one is a merge: you choose a replacement, every reference to the old institution is re-pointed to the replacement, and only then is the old row removed. The button is labelled Delete & Reassign.

Use it when the same organisation has been entered twice, or when an institution has been absorbed by another.

  1. Open the institution you want to remove.
  2. Choose delete, and in the dialog pick the replacement from the Replace with list. It cannot be the institution itself.
  3. Confirm with Delete & Reassign.

What is re-pointed: specimens' inst, biobank institution and collector affiliation; people's affiliation; project and sequence sites; and any institutions that had the old one as a parent. After the merge, all of those show the replacement, and the old name and code are gone.

A merge cannot be undone. There is no record of which specimens or people were re-pointed, so if you need to know, note the counts or download the affected records before you merge. Pick a replacement in the same country or region, since provenance reporting on the re-pointed records will now show the replacement's details.

Good to know

Good to know: A merge is refused when the institution being removed is recorded as the sovereign institution of any specimen (the sovereign_inst field). The error does not say so; the institution is simply left as it was and nothing is re-pointed. Change those specimens' sovereign institution first, then merge again.

Good to know: Merging an institution changes what users see on their records and profiles immediately, without telling them. Where a merge affects a project's specimens, let the project manager know.

Limit: The institutions list does not show how many specimens, people or projects refer to each institution, so there is no way from this page to see how large the effect of a merge will be.