The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for natural science collections. The DiSSCo RI works for the digital unification of all European natural science assets under common curation and access policies and practices. These aim to make the data easily Findable, more Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). As such, DiSSCo enables the transformation of a fragmented landscape of the crucial natural science collections into an integrated knowledge base that provides interconnected hard evidence on the natural world. DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanical gardens and collection-holding universities in the world.

Mission
Our mission is to bring up the major Bulgarian biodiversity collections into the Digital Era. As a part of the pan-European DiSSCo RI, we adhere at its mission, which is entirely valid for the present project. It is “to mobilise, unify and deliver biodiversity information at the scale, form and precision required by scientific communities; transforming a fragmented landscape into a coherent and responsive research infrastructure.” Taking into account the specificities of the conceptual and technological level of our collections, we formulate the following mission of DiSSCo- BG: to bring up the major Bulgarian biodiversity collections into the Digital Era.

General objective
Upgrade the technological, digital and human capacity level of the major biodiversity and geodiversity collections in Bulgaria maintained by IBER-BAS and NMNHS-BAS in order to increase the capacity of collections and collection-based research to meet the needs of the society of modern biodiversity science in line with the existing international standards and to support the efficient Bulgarian participation in the development of the pan-European RI DiSSCo.