ISIS Glitches » San Diego Zoo

ISIS Glitches
20-07-2008

I thought I'd start a new thread for asking about ISIS listings for San Diego. Since their appears to be so many glitches involved with the SDZS's listing, and their does appear to be those on the forum who can answer these. I'll start with this one.

San Diego Zoo is showing 0.3 Bison bison with 1 new birth in the last 6 months. This can't be correct either is it?

20-07-2008

As a general note, San Diego used to have their own record keeping system that was different from ARKS (the ISIS software), so their updates have always been more difficult and less frequent than many other institutions.

At the moment, ISIS is doing a HUGE project to develop the next generation in animal record keeping software (see where the old acronym came from? ), called ZIMS. I heard at one point that San Diego was one of the test facilities, which may account for the recent hodgepodge of data on ISIS.

Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is!

And you are correct: there are no bison at SDZ right now

20-07-2008

San Diego still currently use their own records system, and there has always been a separate "translation" program which converts their data to the ISIS format, for submission to ISIS. They still maintain their records this way.

They have been doing a huge amount of data cleanup in the past 12-18 months, in prepartion for being one of around 20 test institutions for ISIS' new software product, ZIMS, although the application won't be ready for at least another 12 months, and so no institutions are currently using it as test institutions.

I would guess that any "strange" data showing up for SDZ or SDWAP on the ISIS web site might be due to the cleanup process, which is still ongoing.

21-07-2008

We've had a similar problem at the Toronto Zoo, using our own (separate) record system. Most of our ISIS problems have been with the translating program (which currently goes to ARKS 3, a several-years-old version of the current ISIS software). Some birth dates get scrambled somehow, and causes ISIS to report them as January 1, 1601! However, most of the odd San Diego records are showing up with correct data in ISIS - it is the ISIS software that isn't interpreting correctly.

21-08-2008

I don't know if this is a problem or not, but ISIS reports SD zoo having 39.38.11.16 Rock Hyrax. If SD zoo does have that many hyrax, where do they keep them?

Is there anybody here in Zoobeat from SD that could help us answer all the questions?

25-08-2008

Chester recently had 4025 Seba's bats if you looked on ISIS. The correct number was 425.