On 4th December 2023, at 3 p.m., a status-update meeting of the project team with representatives of the government, the academic community and museums with natural history collections was held in the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia (NMNHS).

The directors of the two institutes of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Pavel Stoev, director of NMNHS and Assoc. Prof. Vladimir Vldaimirov, director of Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (IBER) welcomed the participants, and the Project Leader, Prof. Boyko Georgiev and Assoc. Prof. Borislav Georgiev, Deputy Leader, made presentations to share the progress achieved on all work packages of the project "Upgrading the scientific infrastructure "Distributed system of scientific collections - Bulgaria (DiSSCo-BG): Stage 1 (2020-2023)".

In a discussion after presentations, guests asked questions about the compatibility of different forms of digitization in the natural history collections of other museums, as well as the possibilities of applying the Specify platform.

The guests had the opportunity to visit new facilities for scientific collections of the two institutes, and to observe the process of digitization of a specimen of the entomological collections.