Thanks, Quentin. The choices here matter. We would ideally like to see a single master record for each collection and to have efficient ways for the collection owners themselves to keep it current, but also to benefit from work elsewhere to document important aspects of each collection.
In 2008, TDWG, GBIF and Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh established the Biological Collections Index. This was an early attempt to organise various sources of informaiton on collections. It aimed for a “mix of authoritative and community sourced data by having multiple records for each collection all hanging off a single globally unique ID”. This made it relatively easy to align collection information from multiple sources (and technologies like OpenRefine might make it easier to do something similar today). However, it did not offer an obvious way to progress towards agreeing a standard master version of the information.