[Science news] - DiSSCo Futures

In February 2023, the European projects SYNTHESYS+, DiSSCo Prepare, and MOBILISE concluded, marking a significant milestone in the path towards a European Research Infrastructure that digitally unifies all European natural science collections under common access, curation, policies and practices. 

To celebrate the achievements of these projects and plan for the future, the DiSSCo Futures event brought together more than 160 project participants and stakeholders from 28 countries across Europe. The event was hosted by Meise Botanic Garden, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, and the AfricaMuseum, and took place at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

The three-day program was packed with a variety of presentations, panel discussions, debates, and other activities that focused on key themes developed across the three projects. These themes covered digitisation, access, infrastructure, standards, organisation, and human capacity necessary to create a truly distributed system of scientific collections. Researchers from Meise Botanic Garden in particular contributed to the activities on digitisation, standards development and linked open data.

Following the three-day event, the DiSSCo General Assembly meeting was held, where critical decisions were made to ensure a smooth transition of DiSSCo into its Implementation phase. In addition DiSSCo accepted the membership of three new Flemish institutions, UGent, KU Leuven and ILVO, strengthening the connection between the European infrastructure and the DiSSCo Flanders consortium.