Update: April 2016
It is the beginning of the “Season” here in the Northern hemisphere. Spring is definitely in the air and the birdies are well into breeding, at least here in California. March was a very very busy month for us. Not only did we attend NWRA in Oklahoma but we spent a week in Hawaii working directly with our users.
Yes, I know what you are thinking, “oh you poor things you had to go to Hawaii“… On occasion there is a 
organization that needs our help getting set-up and if they have a lot of previous data, they may need our help importing it as well. Save our Shearwaters on Kaua’i was in need of our help to get them set-up. They have records dating back to 1979 on many species of pelagic Hawaiian birds that are affected by light attraction. The young of these species fledge at night and are drawn to the lights of urban development where they get disoriented and either crash or come to the ground in large numbers in a phenomenon called ‘fallout’. SOS as they are called had very special needs so they invited us out Kauai to transfer all of their data which was in 2 different formats into WRMD. This could 
not have been done without their generous financial support to WRMD. We worked in their office for 4 full days figuring out exactly how to manipulate and sort their data so that it would fit into the WRMD format. I think we all learned a lot with this experience, especially how important and beneficial it is to keep good, consistent records. We are still working on cleaning up this data, but once we do they will have nearly 35,000 records dating back to 1979.
With their help we were able to create the Banding and Morphometrics Extensions and we were able test the Import feature that we’ve been working on. The ability to import is almost done and should be up and running by the end of this month. The moral of this story is that as a community when one organization needs something and can help us build it, it then benefits the whole community! If we are needed to help an organization transition, we are willing to travel to them and help with their data needs if the organization can financially support the travel expenses.
Recent Updates
- Import: Should be up and running by the end of the month at the latest.
- Locking Record Function: We are continuing to improve how records lock and get unlocked so that others can’t use records opened by someone else.
- Latitude, Longitude and County: You may have already noticed, in Settings under General WRMD Settings, you can choose to see the Lat, Long and County found, if it is a location or address that can be found in Google Maps.
- Searching in Extensions: We have been working hard on being able to search more of the fields then just the rescuer, initial care and continued care fields. This was mostly pressed by the need to search in Lab. Well unfortunately Lab is being very difficult and will take some time to figure out how to search appropriately, but in the mean time you will be able to search Prescriptions, Necropsy and Banding/Morphometrics.
Pending Issues
These are issues that are high up on our list of things to get done.
- Searching Lab Values
- Batch Updating
- Printing Necropsy Reports
- Exporting/printing extension fields
