Merge Localities
Having duplicated or similar localities in your collection can lead to lots of suggestions appearing when you are linking a Collection Object to a locality. Additionally, having only one locality for each place means that more effort can be focused on making that locality complete with details, and saves effort when georeferencing.
Constructing a query to find all unique localities in a collection
An easy way to find similar or duplicated localities is to construct a sorted list. This can be done through a query that looks like the following.
Query Locality table
Ensure that the sorting option for Locality Name is set to and that Distinct is checked.
The results returned will look like this
Notice that there are two localities with the same name, and are linked to a geography with the same continent, country, and state. These are good candidates for possible duplicate localities.
Performing the merge
To merge the localities, first click on the next to both records that you want to merge. Then click Merge Records. This will open up the merge dialogue, which will show any differences between the two localities. Here it seems that the two longitudes are slightly different, but probably represent the same place. The column on the far left represents what the final record will look like after the merge. You can always manually change the values, or use the button to use the value from one of the records set to be merged. Clicking on Linked Records will allow you to see anything that is linked to the locality.
Clicking Merge will finalize the merge.