Onderzoeksproject EF/241/BE-DISSCo-FED (Onderzoeksactie EF)
The DiSSCo Research Infrastructure is now entering its implementation phase. The main financed partners of BE.DiSSCo-FED will be RBINS (member of the DiSSCo interim General Assembly - iGA) and RMCA (observer at the DiSSCo iGA). The project aims at strengthening the roles of these two federal institutions in the framework of DiSSCO at European and Belgian levels. RBINS will also strengthen its role as (proposed) National Node and as partner of the upcoming DiSSCo Transition European project (2023-2025), the last project before the creation of the ERIC and the RI construction phase.
RBINS contributed in DiSSCo Prepare, under the governance pillar, to the selection of the legal entity model (ERIC) and the drafting of the Statutes. The Institute collaborated also with CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) on the development of a Specialization tool, a prototype platform allowing the gathering, categorizing, storage and analysis of NH collections related information. These emanate from the core activities of DiSSCo community as existing data or to be developed by the Collections holding institutions and National Nodes. The prototype must now (2023) be implemented at the European RI and global scale and be ready for the integration of Natural History collections related data from more than 100 institutions.
One task of Be.DiSSCo-FED will be to analyse all the specialization data gathered in the tool to define a clear specialization strategy for the DiSSCo infrastructure. The associated research and development will focus on:
a) the analysis of the NH collections related data (e.g. Number of specimens per type of collections, number of digitized specimens, collections curators, etc.) , the research fields, the scientific infrastructures/instruments used for research or collection handling, the collections dedicated to exhibition, and the training of staff for collection curation or digitization techniques,
b) the integration of these data in dedicated visualisation and management decision tools. RBINS will collaborate on this two-fold technical (?) developments with the Belgian institutions relevant for DiSSCo (whether they have or not yet signed an MoU with the DiSSCo.eu partnership).
Another task will focus on the persistent identifier (PID) of collections. Both CETAF collections dashboard and DiSSCo Prepare specialization plan propose a hierarchy of the main DiSSCo collections and sub-collections. This hierarchy must be linked to the GrSciColl inventory and its Collection identification system. The goal is to use the diversity of the Belgian collections to develop and test a standardized identification of the collections, and to propose a dedicated strategy and tailored tools to the DiSSCo community.
The Be.DiSSCo-FED proposal will also work on the standardization of the Description of the collections using the Latimer Core proposed by TDWG and to the standardization of the multimedia files produced by the High-Resolution digitization of the specimens, to allow a FAIR access by Humans and machines.
