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Rob van den Berg (1963) is a palaeontologist by training. He was an IT-specialist and manager before he started working in the museum field. First as curator, later as head of exhibitions and as director in different museums. Now he is head of the collection management department at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands.
Digital specimens, the future of natural science collections?
Are digital specimens the future of natural science collections? Infrastructure initiatives such as Europe’s Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) aim at transforming today’s slow, inefficient and limited practices of working with natural science collections. It will change the need to borrow specimens (plants, animals, fossils or rocks) or physically visit collections by creating digital specimens as surrogates in cyberspace for physical specimens.