A lot to unpack here, yes.
Let us start by saying that ELViS is alive (!). He is giving his first steps, in fact. We are not talking about the king of the mellow songs, the sequins and the sideburns, mind you. We are talking about the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS).
What is ELViS exactly?
ELViS is a single access point to European Natural Science Collections. It provides a unified way to request visits, loans and virtual access (VA), the latter providing digitisation on demand as a new type of access. ELViS’s request mechanism enables future services for tracking usage metrics, monitoring & reporting and connecting collection usage with research outputs.
If we say that ELViS is giving his first steps is because, for now, it is operational with a limited number of collection providers (SYNTHESYS+ partners).
The part of “…in the DiSSCo”
Ok, we should probably have said “in DiSSCo” -or even better, in DiSSCo RI- which is the Distributed System of Scientific Collections. ELViS is one of the several digital services provided by the community of DiSSCo’s partner institutions for data analysis and interpretation. It is in fact the one service with the highest level of technology readiness (a version 2 of ELViS will be released in 2022).
As for DiSSCo, it is no simple Research Infrastructure. You can think of DiSSCo as the Research Infrastructure for European Natural Science Collections. The reason: it aims to digitally unify all European natural science assets under common access, curation, policies and practices, ensuring that all the available data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles). In other words: DiSSCo aims to build one big European collection (big as in 1,5 billion specimens; 130+ institutions; 21 countries so far!).
DiSSCo services open the door for a digital transformation of the way technology, processes and people interact in Natural Science Collections. And the best part: our home sweet home Naturalis plays a crucial role in all this. It is not for nothing that DiSSCo’s Coordination and Support Office is located right here in Darwinweg 2 (get to the 5th floor, turn right and you’ll find us at the end of the hallway).
Interested? Visit us at dissco.eu or feel free to drop us a line at info@dissco.eu Even better, attend one of the workshops about DiSSCo and other services that we will announce in short.
The post ELViS is in the DiSSCo appeared first on DiSSCo.