Documentation Part 2: Test Driving Trilobase

In my last post, I told you all about why one should document their fossil (or mineral/artifact/natural history) collection. Today I get into a bit more detail on how. 

As I mentioned before, I started documenting my collection by way of drawings and photos in physical journals. However, everything got backlogged. It took too much time to make a scrapbook style journal that included everything I brought home from each trip. 

Where I volunteer, we use Specify, a subscription-based database intended for institutional use. It allows museums to create shareable databases of their natural history holdings including taxonomy, provenance, notes on how to find the location of origin, preservation type,  photos, and just about anything else one would need to know about the specimen.  And, it's eminently editable as taxonomy changes, better pictures are taken, etc. It's wonderful, but it's not appropriate for a single, relatively small, private collection.

I started using what I had on hand. I made spread sheets at home with all my data,  plus a separate folder of photographs whose file names were the serial numbers for the specimens. It works alright. It's free and doesn't eat space on my hard drive for extra software. However, it is very cumbersome to go back and forth between folders when I want to look something up.

 After six months or so of thinking about this, looking online unsuccessfully for something more to my scale, and discussing with my developer hubby the possibility of designing our own, I saw mention on a forum about Trilobase.  The Trilobase database was created by a fossil collector and IT Developer specifically for managing small, private fossil, mineral, and artifact collections like mine. The free trial is a full version of the software with a limit of 100 specimen entries. That covers one or two of the three field trips I made last month, anyway. I gave it whirl this week.

Trilobase's fossil specimen form field

The program has separate sections for fossils, minerals, artifacts, collecting sites, bibliography, groups and storage. Once collecting sites and bibliographic notes are added to the database, individual sites and references can be added by drag-and-drop into specimen entries. The Groups page allows you to create search tags with open-ended fields to make your own name and sorting system. The Storage tab is a virtual warehouse with "rooms," "cabinets" and "drawers" that appear as a tiered list on the screen. Specimens are added to the drawers by dragging and dropping the drawer name into the specimen's form field.

In addition to the drag-and-drop data in the main menu, each of the three collection types has its own  relevant form fields. Fossils have taxonomy and geological timescale. Minerals have spaces for things like chemical formula, crystal structure, and mineral properties. Artifacts include typology, discovery location and excavation method, and method of manufacture. Each one has plenty of space to make your own notes and add photos.

Overall, I found the software really easy to use. The form fields are intuitive and flexible to suit personal organization style. It is smart enough to put things in numerical order by the serial number you assign rather than the order in which you entered the data. There are pop-up windows to auto-fill a time period or the taxonomy. You can search through your collection by serial number, group, Storage location or keyword.

What's more, Trilobase includes a photo editor for cropping, adding scale rulers and text, etc. 

I used Trilobase's photo editor to add a scale bar to this oyster photo.

Once you have entered in your treasures, you can select any number of them to print labels in a variety of sizes, with or without pictures. I found the selection process a bit tricky when I wanted to remove individual items from the print list, but it sure beats doing them all in a word processor!

I just bought the unlocked version today and the price is right. You can pay by one of six different currencies that amount to about $16 US. But, the developer prefers payment in fossils!

On the down side, the app is only available for Windows 8 and above. My main machine is a Mac desktop computer. I had to settle for installing it on my Windows laptop. Even with a relatively large screen on my laptop, the form fields that I had to juggle were awkward to manage. Ideally, I would use this on a dual-screen system, which I'm not planning to buy anytime soon.

The one thing I'd love to see down the road is the capability to compare listings on my screen. For example, if I am trying to identify something and want to compare it to other pieces in my collection, it might be nice to pull a few labels up on my screen for side-by-side comparison. As it is, Trilobase is only designed for print output.

Overall, I am very happy with the 50 or so entries I created in my fossil "drawers." I feel like this is really going to streamline my collection management. I'll give it 4 stars out of five.