Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
SESAR (System for Earth Sample Registration) at Columbia University Lamont-Doherty.
- Is an instance
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collections as a research sample repository.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A dataset repository without physical samples is not a sample repository.
- Not an instance
A library of published reports is not a sample repository.
Editorial commentary
A sample repository catalogues, stores, and provides research access to physical specimens — as distinct from a data repository, which holds only digital files. The category spans geoscience (SESAR, the international IGSN allocator, and rock-core or water-sample archives), oceanography, environmental science (insect, plant, and soil specimen collections), natural history and museum collections, agricultural seed banks, and biomedical sample collections.
What’s different about managing physical, not digital, holdings
Because the thing being preserved is a physical object rather than a bitstream, sample-repository operations carry logistics that a pure data repository does not: climate-controlled or cold-chain storage, physical-condition quality assurance over time, inter-institutional shipping and loan tracking, and — increasingly — minting a persistent identifier (typically an IGSN-style ID or a DataCite DOI) at the point of sample registration so the specimen can be cited and its provenance tracked the same way a dataset would be.
Where this overlaps, and doesn’t, with biobank
A collection of human biological material used in research on human subjects is, in the fully general sense, also a “sample repository” — but it is conventionally referred to and, more importantly, governed as a biobank instead, because human-subjects regulation (IRB/REC oversight, informed consent, participant withdrawal rights) applies on top of ordinary physical-specimen custodianship. A geological, environmental, agricultural, or museum sample repository holding no human-derived material has no such overlay — its governance is a curation and access-control question, not a human-research-ethics one. The distinction matters operationally: a researcher standing up a new specimen collection needs to know, before choosing a governance model, whether the specimens are human-derived.
References
- Lehnert K., Klump J., ‘Sample identification and physical-specimen archives’, Earth-Science Reviews 215, 2021.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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