What you have to write down

No regulator specifies a record in this craft. Every commercial and conservation question depends on having one.

Nothing is prescribed, and everything matters

There is no batch record requirement, no mandated retention, no inspection.

What there is instead: an insurance claim that needs a valued inventory, a buyer who needs provenance, a land manager who might ask where material came from, and a condition problem that only shows as a trend.

All four are answered by records you chose to keep.

The four records

The catalog. One row per specimen: number, species, locality at every level, source, dates, size, price paid, identification basis, treatments, provenance, storage location, hazard flag, photograph reference.

Acquisition records. Who you bought from, what you paid, and for self-collected material the site, the date and the land status. That last field is what answers a question about a specimen's legitimacy years later.

Sales records. What went where, with the specimen number, which is what makes it possible to contact a buyer if an identification turns out to be wrong.

Condition records. The annual check, by drawer, so a slow failure is visible as a trend rather than as a discovery.

Retention

Indefinitely, which is unusual and correct here.

A specimen outlives its owner, and the catalog is what lets the next one understand what they have. Collections have been rendered near-worthless by a catalog discarded in a clearance.

Export to a plain format annually and keep a copy away from the collection.

The retrieval test

Take a specimen off a shelf. How long to produce its locality, its source, what you paid, what has been done to it and where the photograph is?

Minutes is a working system. If the answer is that it is written on a label in the box and nowhere else, you have a label rather than a record, and labels are the thing that gets lost.

References