Digitization of natural history objects brings about numerous challenges for the housing institutions, data aggregators and the scientific community as a whole. This is especially true with respect to data management. Based on the experiences at the Department of Botany of the Natural History Museum Vienna we illustrate one major common problem: referencing people names. We focus on collectors as a subset of people associated with objects. Problems and possible ways of unambiguously referencing collector names in collection management systems and global online platforms (such as GBIF) by using persistent unique identifiers (e. g., Wikidata, GND, VIAF, or ORCID) for these names are outlined. The example of G.W.H. Schimper, who is best known for collecting 100,000s of specimens in Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia in the 19th century, is used to demonstrate the importance of primary (e. g., biographical) data and its open availability in this context. To close gaps and settle uncertainties in publicly recommended authority lists, several biographical details for G.W.H. Schimper are presented and verified by offical documents and their transcripts: date and place of birth, sequence of given names, and date and place of marriage of his parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]