How to express provenance of specimens on natural history collections

[EstebanMH-SiB]

Edoardo one of our users left a question using the GBIF portal feedback that is best suited here:

Speaking of natural history collections: how can I indicate how a specimen was acquired? I don't think there's a header in Darwincore to indicate whether a specimen was collected, purchased, acquired via exchange, or received as a donation.

Is there a preferred way to document that information on DwC? I was thinking that in DwC-DP it can be done using the term Provenance, but I am nor sure what is the best way to do it on DwC

[tucotuco]

@EstebanMH-SiB

Currently, in a Darwin Core Archive, if more structure is needed than you would get by adding this information to dwc:materialEntityRemarks, then dwc:dynamicProperties is a reasonable solution without adding the MeasurementOrFact extension. You would have to define the name of the key you wanted this information to be shared as and have the community agree to use this key in dwc:dynamicProperties. An example might be:

{ "materialProvenanceType":"collected" }

Darwin Core Data Packages have a Provenance class, but there is no property in that class to cover this use case either. The dynamicProperties equivalent for DwC-DP is to create an Assertion, specifically a Material Assertion in which the assertion would be (using the same terminology as in the example above):
assertionType = "materialProvenanceType"
assertionValue = "collected"

This is the equivalent of the MeasurementOrFact solution for Darwin Core Archives.

If there is sufficient independent demand, a new property of the dwc:MaterialEntity class can be proposed.