This exclusive event will explore the digital transformation that DiSSCo brings to natural history collections and the opportunities and challenges that DiSSCo services present.
5 November 2025
09:00 – 12:25h (CET)
Auditorium Naturalis
Highlights of the programme
DiSSCo Services for researchers and collections managers
DiSSCo’s services will:
1. Improve both physical and digital access to European Natural History Collections.
2. Support digitisation at scale
3. Provide a unique access point for data analysis, curation, and annotation (including AI mechanisms)
About the session: Our colleagues Wouter Addink and Mathilde Lescanne will offer an overview of DiSSCo’s catalogue of services, and how they will open new possibilities for researchers and collection managers.
Exploring ELViS (European Loans and Visits System)
The DiSSCo Showcase Event includes demos of both ELViS and DiSSCover.
ELViS is the European Loans and Visits System. As its name indicates, it provides a unified access point for requesting visits, loans, and virtual access to European natural history collections. ELViS also offers digitisation on demand, as a new type of virtual access.
About the session: Our colleague from MNHM, Maxime Griveau, will give us “le tour” through ELViS, which is already a working prototype.
Discovering DiSSCover
DiSSCover is DiSSCo’s unified system for curation and annotation of digital specimens (both by humans and AI systems). Although DiSSCover is technically in production, it already contains the basic functionalities to explore the DiSSCo digital objects catalogue, make annotations, and use Machine Annotation Services.
About the session: Sam Leeflang, Soulaine Theocharides, and Melanie de Leeuw are leading the development of DiSSCover. They will offer a hands-on, practical session about the service building on the case studies presented during the event.
Case studies from DiSSCo early adopters
The DiSSCo Showcase Event will present several case studies from early adopters of DiSSCo that provide flesh and bones to our technical developments: the Papillotten Project; the first scientific publication using digital specimen DOIs (about the genera Chrysilla and Phintelloides); and the creation of virtual reference collections.
About the session: The session will consist of short presentations by our Naturalis colleagues Monica Guimaraes (Papillotten Project); Jeremy Miller, Andres Rivera (digital specimen DOIs); and Wouter Addink (reference collections), plus the session about ELViS described above.
Roundtable and feedback sessions
It is good to hear your voices, particularly when the future is at stake. For this reason, the DiSSCo Showcase Event will finish with a roundtable, followed by a feedback session, where we hope to gather your views about the way ahead for DiSSCo, natural history collections, and scientific research practice.
About the session: Chaired by Wouter Addink, the roundtable will invite the presenters of the case studies. Right after this session, our colleague Eva Alonso will handle the Mentimeter to collect your opinions on a variety of topics.
Detailed programme
