How to associate images of trays of specimens with their specimen records?

[themerekat]

Posting this discussion so it can be seen and commented on by members of the community.

From Megan King: "A non related herbarium question but Symbiota Portal related... I am looking to take images of unit trays for our entomology collection, I am thinking of how I can relate these to the records on the SCAN portal."

Katie: "One option would be to assign lot or tray numbers to each of the trays and put this number in the "OtherCatalogNumbers" field for all the specimens in that tray. Then, when you upload the images, you can select the "match on other catalog number" option. I'm not exactly sure this would work as expected because you'll have a one-tray-to-many-specimens relationship, but we could probably figure something out on the backend as long as each specimen has the tray number associated with it."

Megan: "That would be great since that is my design for the imaging! We’re associating a unique identifier that includes a data matrix with each drawer and then each unit tray has its own number for each drawer so the file name for each unit tray image will be Order_RUEM######_#.

I am thinking since that the most difficult part would likely be matching the specimen barcodes to the unit tray it might be easier to have the images linked as associated media. The idea is that I will have Rutgers design a webpage where we will serve the images to until we can acquire the funding for the equipment to do single specimen imaging. However I know nothing about associated media and how that works."