Applies to: Web Edition
People & Creators gives you the opportunity to record historical /contextual information about the people associated with your collections (the owner, user, creator, or subject of the item). Through People records, you can keep biographical information such as family connections, education, residences, birth and death dates, etc. People is the authority file used to fill the People and Creator fields in your catalog records. Creators are a part of the People database and are marked as creators with a checkbox. For more information, see the People & Creators User Guide topic. With the Public Access add-on, People records can be shared as part of your public site.
Contacts is designed to track people that contribute to your organization. This area shows their relationships with your organization in terms of donations (money, items, time, etc.) and allows you to communicate with them through printed letters and emails. When a contact moves away, passes away, or becomes an inactive member, you can update their Contact record to indicate the change in the relationship.
As a general concept, Contacts have a relationship with your organization, while People are permanently tied to the collection. You may stop communicating with the individuals that appear in Contacts, but the items in your collection will always be connected with the People and their biographies.
However, you may also have a person who might have both a Contact record and a People record. For example, one of your volunteers gives a collection of her family's old photographs to your archives. The person will have a Contact record as a volunteer and a collections donor. If she is pictured in some of the photographs, she will have a People record as well and be listed in the People field in the Photos catalog records.