The Collections

Most of this site is written to be read. These two are written to be looked up.

A collection here means a set of structured records covering one kind of thing exhaustively, in a fixed set of fields, so that any two entries can be compared. Where an article asks what is this practice and what can we say about it, a record answers what is this material, what is in it, where did it come from, and is it safe. Different question, different shape, different page.

One rule, applied twice

Both collections are organised around the material, and never around what somebody wants from it. That is not a stylistic preference. It is the whole design, and it is enforced in the code rather than promised in the copy.

A herbal is arranged by what you want fixed: you look up insomnia and it hands you a list of plants. A herbarium is arranged by the plant. A crystal directory is arranged by what you want to feel: you look up anxiety and it hands you a list of stones. A lithotheque is arranged by the mineral.

The ailment index and the property index are the same mistake wearing different clothes, and neither exists here. You can look up a species or a stone by name, by family, by chemistry, by hazard. There is deliberately no route from a complaint or an intention back to a list of things to buy, and the site's search will not provide one either — the records are indexed by identity only.

What is checked rather than asserted

Both collections are verified against an external authority, because 300 records asserted from memory would look authoritative and quietly not be.

Plant names go to the GBIF backbone taxonomy. Minerals go to the master list of the International Mineralogical Association's Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification. Every entry states whether that check has been done, and the checks have earned their place — between them they have corrected a couple of dozen errors that would otherwise have shipped, including several I was confident about.

Both also carry a hazard rating from a fixed vocabulary, because in both collections the honest answer to "is this safe" is sometimes no.