Explore with the community the idea of historical contacts

[ManonGros]

I am logging the idea to possibly be discussed at a later GRSciColl community webinar.

The original comment was:

Would it be better to mark [former] contacts inactive or invalid instead of deleting them? The consideration is that when tracing specimen handling, sometimes it helps to know who has been in the institution, but deletion means that knowledge is no longer available.

Note that GRSciColl used to have a staff registry but we decided to keep only collection and institution contacts instead. The rationale is explained here: https://github.com/gbif/registry/issues/379 https://github.com/gbif/registry/issues/485 https://github.com/gbif/registry/issues/473

There are some advantages of keeping track of historical contacts:

It will be valuable hints for many who will be tracing taxonomic histories and knowing what to ask before reaching out to the current contacts, which saves time.

Note that with the work on collection descriptors, people will be able to share collector's names and names of people who identify the specimens. Perhaps linking GRSciColl to Bionomia would be an alternative to keep historical contacts (https://github.com/gbif/registry/issues/499).

Some additional notes:

• we should not (re)start curating personal information in a second system - if linking entries from Bionomia could work, great, but let's not try to duplicate (and curate) content in parallel
• we may have a couple of personal data legal things to keep an eye on, in particular the EU GDPR rules
• enabling the editing of data comes with a responsibility to also keep it up to date - a lot of work with a so far unquantified benefit;

[ckotwn]

I suggest further discussions should distinguish contacts associated with collections and institutions from those within the scope of the aforementioned "staff registry." My intention in raising this is to make inactive, invalid, retired contacts visible for complementing benefits rather than supply missing information or maintain a holistic contact system.