Several people have written to request how to determine a unique coden for the ECN standard. As I understood, institutions listed in the current index of Insect and Spider Collections of the World (Arnett, Samuelson, Heppner, Nishida, Watt, and Woodruff) would use the coden in it, or if a new or specialized database, would register it with Chris Thomson at USDA-SEL until a more formal setup could be arrainged.

Another point raised was the 6 digit number following the alphanumeric identifier. This was a minimum, and if more than a million numbers were needed, those in the seventh place could become part of the alphanumeric field. An alternative is a letter following the coden, and then start over from 0. 24 letters in single suffix mode would provide 24 million unique numbers associated with a given coden. Although the standard coden is 4 letters, there is no special status to this size. The only thing about it is that for a database of one million specimens, an extra letter adds a storage need of 1 byte per cell, or 1 meg of disk space.

Mike Ivie