field for noting specimen is part of a special collection? from DwC Hour Input Form 9/3/2021 17:26:44

[iDigBioBot]

A user submitted this information via the Darwin Core Hour webform:
Timestamp: 9/3/2021 17:26:44
Please provide a topic of interest: Is there a DwC term for recording that a material (collection) object is part of some "special" collection? (I realize this will be easier to do once the Collection Descriptions standard is in place). But for now, if I'm publishing specimens for a "subset" of or "special part of" a larger collection, how can I indicate that at the occurrence level? Is there a field?
Are you capable of and interested in participating: Yes
Who else would you recommend to participate in the presentation: The Collection Descriptions convenors
What resources can you point to:
Your name: Debbie Paul
Your email: dlpaul@illinois.edu
Your GitHub username: @debpaul

[tucotuco]

There is no separate field dedicated to this purpose. Some of the examples of special collections of which I am aware are published as separate resources as any other collection would be. This has the advantage of being able to provide all of the collection metadata as dataset metadata. If there is some compelling reason not to publish a separate dataset for the special collection, I think all one is left with is naming the collection in the collectionCode field. Does that help?

[debpaul]

Thanks @tucotuco I note that in the new CD standard, there will be a way to indicate the cd:collectionName in the ObjectGroup class and in doing so, also indicate which collection it may be a subset of. (We want to be able to compute across and not duplicate metrics when counting objects). Thanks Matt Woodburn for the details!

Providing separate datasets is an okay solution, but (as you already grok) limits our ability to be free to group-the-groups accurately in many different ways -- when it comes to trying to count / do metrics across all collections.

Closing this now. Anyone who wants to add their thoughts, feel free to re-open.