[Feature Request]: Make Preparations field "expandable"

[genevieve-anderegg]

Symbiota Portal Name

Ecdysis

Is your feature/tool request related to a problem? Please describe.

The Preparations field is not "expandable" on data entry/edit form. It can contain larger strings of characters, but you must navigate through the field by holding down the arrow keys (or highlighting everything and copy/pasting it elsewhere) in order to easily read the entire field.

Describe the solution you'd like.

We would like the Preparations field to be expandable, either by clicking a "pencil" button, or by dragging on the lower right hand corner, as you can do with the Locality field. We want this so we can place and more easily read detailed information in this field.

Who else has expressed a desire for this feature/tool?

DMNS Zoology Staff

When and how would this feature be used? What are some use cases?

We are intending on entering more detailed information into the Preparations field, because we believe it is the best place for it. In short, a majority of specimens in our Arachnology collection are preserved in 75% ethanol. We have several hundred specimens we recently measured as being at less than the ideal percentage of ethanol, and then slowly stepped them back up through a concentration ladder to be at our ideal storage concentration of 75%. We would like to record this information because the lower concentrations these specimens were stored at will impact the quality of their DNA, and we want to make sure that information is quickly available in the specimen record so that we do not loan out specimens that possibly have lower quality DNA. We intend to write in each of the appropriate specimen records "Ethanol in this vial measured at XX% in August 2023. Stepped back up to 75% by October 2023. G. Anderegg" so that this information is easily accessible in the catalog record. This data is most appropriate for the Preparations field. But it would be nice to be able to more easily read longer strings of data in that field.

If this is not ideal, then another solution could be adding a specific Curatorial Remarks (or similar field).

Additional context

No response

[annakfowler]

Users of the Minnesota Biodiversity Atlas portal have also expressed interest in this field to be able to record Preparation history outside of dynamicProperties. They also have requested Preparator/Prepared By and Preparation Date fields.

[themerekat]

This seems part of the much bigger data standards issue of needing a preparations vocabulary and/or the preparations field to be further split out into new Darwin Core terms. See: gbif/vocabulary#97