What to do to occurrences for deaccessioned specimens of Natural history collections?

Data Publishing
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Some specimens of my institution where recently deaccessioned because they were included by mistake when they were in fact specimens of other institution.
What is the right thing to do in that case? I guess I could just republish the dataset with dwc:disposition = deaccessioned, but if the legitimate owner publishes a new occurrence corresponding to those specimens they will be duplicates, i.e. two records of the same occurrence. Should I remove them from the dataset?

Also, If one record was created by mistake and published, what is the proper way to deal with it when we realise it was created by mistake? Just remove it form the dataset?

I’ve created a tombstone page on our dataportal indicating the deletion date and reason (http://coicatalogue.uc.pt/specimen/COI00089298), but I cannot find any information on what to do with deaccesioned records on GBIF datasets.

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Hi @joaquimsantos

You don’t necessarily have to remove the records from GBIF. If you know that those have been republished (for certain) removing them is a good idea.
However, if you are unsure, it might be best to keep them on GBIF while changing the dwc:disposition and using the catalogueNumber of the original specimen when possible.

Our system will attempt to find and highlight related records based on the catalogue numbers and other characteristics (see also: Occurrence clustering :: Technical Documentation). This should help users deduplicate records.

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