Five million digital specimens and images in DiSSCo: millions more to come

Authors: Sharif Islam, Wouter Addink, Soulaine Theocharides, and  Sam Leeflang.  We are proud to announce a major milestone: over five million digital specimens and digital media objects are now available in DiSSCo. You can see them right now on our DiSSCover platform! These resources are now live and can be referenced through their DOIs (DigitalContinue reading “Five million digital specimens and images in DiSSCo: millions more to come”

Identifiers and contextual data

Persistent identifiers, their links to other identifiers and various contextual data are essential components of the DiSSCo architectural design. Here is a brief example to demonstrate the importance of these identifiers, linking them and providing enough contextual information to perform operations on the digital specimen objects. The example here also highlights some of the challengesContinue reading “Identifiers and contextual data”

What is a Digital Specimen?

With projected lifespans of many decades, infrastructure initiatives such as Europe’s Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), USA’s Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) of China and Australia’s digitisation of national research collections (NRCA Digital, available through the Atlas of Living Australia) aim at transforming today’s slow, inefficient and limited practices ofContinue reading “What is a Digital Specimen?”