Most of the authority files used in biodiversity informatics are databases of taxonomic names, such as those made available by WoRMS and the Catalogue of Life. An index of botanists has been developed by Harvard University Herbaria and Libraries that includes both taxonomists and collectors, and Groom et al. (2020) have argued for online resources that would include all specimen collectors.

Publicly available authority files for collecting events are much rarer, although these do exist within individual institutions. For example, the Queensland Museum Entomology Collection can provide to interested researchers an events table with locality name, georeference, upper and lower elevation, starting and finishing date, collector name(s) and collecting method. The table covers thousands of collecting events, mainly in Queensland, dating back to the early years of the 20th century.

In the past, tables of collecting events were familiar items in the reports of major scientific expeditions. Documentation of the HMS Challenger voyage in the 1870s includes a table (Anonymous 1885) with date, location, collecting method and sea and bottom conditions for more than 500 sampling locations. The 1905 Michaelsen-Hartmeyer expedition to Western Australia reported its results with a list of numbered collection stations and dates, and a map with the numbered stations clearly marked (Michaelsen and Hartmeyer 1907).

In contrast, the BushBlitz program in Australia has not required participants to report collecting event data from the 40 Bush Blitz expeditions undertaken since 2010. Each expedition produces a report with a narrative of field work and a summary of results, but individual collecting events might only be documented as uniform dots on maps, e.g. "Appendix B: Collecting sites" (Bush Blitz 2020). Records of collecting events are the responsibility of individual Bush Blitz participants, and specimen occurrence records are only expected to appear, eventually, in the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), or in scientific publications. A complete, correct and consistently formatted authority file of collecting events for each Bush Blitz expedition would be useful to participants, natural history collections and ALA.

Less formal but still valuable sources of collecting event data are digitised field books, such as those made available by The Field Book Project of the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Field book data typically require interpretation and reformatting, but they are excellent raw material for authority files.

As with other look-up tables, an authority file for collecting events allows users to avoid database entry errors and to correct errors in data items already in databases. Users may also find information in the authority file that was unintentionally omitted from database entries based on specimen labels, or deliberately excluded in compliance with institutional databasing rules.

I compiled the authority file presented here in Darwin Core format after noticing that museum data in ALA included occurrence records attributed to me as collector with wrong dates and georeferences. The errors presumably arose when museum staff or volunteers entered data incorrectly from labels or data files I had provided. I also found "false positive" records in which I was erroneously listed as a collector. I contacted the relevant institutions asking that these errors be corrected, but there are undoubtedly other such mistakes and omissions in ALA and in museum databases.

I hope the dataset offered here will be of value in future for checking and completing museum database entries, and for avoiding the need for individual institutions to independently georeference my collecting localities. How authority-file information can best be incorporated into collection databases is a matter for institutional data mangers to decide. Users are welcome to contact me for clarifications and for additional information about particular collecting events, and minor updates to the authority file (additional events) may appear in future as new versions in Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4990402).

I thank David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa) for an email discussion about collector authority files, Simon Grove and Kirrily Moore (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart) and Stephen Keable (Australian Museum, Sydney) for advice on data, and reviewers Nicky Nicolson and Alison Vaughan for suggestions that improved the manuscript.