Towards a collection management infrastructure for Flanders (DiSSCo)

DiSSCo is a new world-class Research Infrastructure for the physical and digital curation of European natural science collections under common management and access policies. To make the collections more visible and used, their associated data and media should become more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). Representing the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoos, universities and other collection-holding institutions, DiSSCo enables the transformation of a fragmented landscape into an integrated knowledge base. DiSSCo Flanders will address biological, anthropological and geological collections, comprising preserved, living, tissue and molecular collections. Smaller lab and orphan collections are fully part of this proposal to guarantee their proper conservation and re-usability. The whole workflow from specimen sampling in the field to their digitization and online publication enabling re-use of the data and media will be addressed in terms of proper collection management.