The Label Standard That Has Not Changed Since Linnaeus
A herbarium specimen without proper attribution is scientifically useless. The physical sheet — pressed plant, label, archive envelope — has been the standard since the 18th century precisely because the label captures the minimum information required to make the specimen meaningful to any botanist who encounters it later: what it is, where it was collected, when, and by whom. The leg (legit, collected by) and det (determinavit, identified by) fields are not formalities. They are the chain of custody for taxonomic determinations and the contact for any challenge or verification.
A digital herbarium that omits those fields, or buries them in a Notes cell, is not a herbarium. It is a photo album with Latin captions.
The Anatomy of a Complete Specimen Record
Signum is the collection accession code — the unique identifier that ties the database record to the physical sheet or container. Without the signum, the digital record and the physical specimen cannot be confidently matched, and any collection large enough to span multiple field seasons will eventually produce duplicates or gaps that can only be resolved by going back to the physical material.
Nomen latinum and Familia together establish the taxonomic position. Common name (nomen) is the accessibility field — the one used when communicating with non-specialists, in exhibition labels, or in public access databases where the Latin binomial alone creates a barrier. Both fields are needed because neither alone is sufficient. Atropa belladonna without the common name Deadly Nightshade loses its immediate recognition for general audiences. "Deadly Nightshade" without the Latin loses precision — the same common name can refer to different species across regions.
Locus as a free-text surroundings description captures the habitat context that GPS coordinates alone cannot: "damp limestone pavement in partial shade, north-facing slope, approximately 650m elevation, associated with Origanum vulgare and Sesleria caerulea." The associated GPS location field pins the exact point. The locus text explains what was there. Both are necessary for a specimen record that can support ecological research, not just taxonomy.
The two image fields — imago (the specimen itself) and imago loc (the location where it was found) — capture the specimen as it was and the microhabitat in which it grew. The imago loc is frequently omitted in digital collections that prioritize the herbarium sheet scan. That omission removes the habitat context from every specimen in the collection, which matters for any analysis correlating species distribution with habitat conditions.
A Record Worth Finding in Twenty Years
The det field — the person who made the identification — is the field that enables the re-determination workflow. Taxonomic revisions happen. A specimen determined as Euphrasia stricta in 2006 may require re-determination after a monographic revision that splits the aggregate. If the original determiner is named, they can be contacted. If the determination date is in the notatio, the revision context can be applied. If the det field is empty, the determination has no authority and no revision pathway.
Notatio as a free-text observations field carries everything the structured fields cannot: phenological state at collection (early flowering, fruiting, past prime), unusual morphological features, collection difficulty ("growing from cliff face, two specimens only, one retained for collection"), or curation notes added post-collection.
For a collection that extends to beetles, butterflies, mushrooms, or lichens — as the template explicitly supports — the signum convention, taxonomy fields, and leg/det structure apply unchanged. The GPS-anchored locus description and dual images are equally applicable to a Cantharellus cibarius fruiting body logged in October and a Caloplaca lichen scraping bagged at 1200m. The field names are Latin, but the collection logic is universal.