The unified discovery environment will be one of the products that ReIReS is offering. Since the start of ReIReS, WP6 has been working on it and step-by-step it is getting closer to the final result.

The intention is to integrate the relevant sources and collections managed by the consortium members into a single platform. The necessary information on these datasets has already been collected and some of them mapped to a shared data model, making them interoperable and searchable from a single platform. The intention is to cater to the growing needs of researchers to discover sources spread out over different, often small, collections.

Those needs and the digital solutions that can be implemented to meet those needs were the subject of a presentation (Dutch language) by Roxanne Wyns during the Informatie aan Zee convention, with an emphasis on the lessons learned during the WP6 tasks. The convention also hosted poster presentation, inluding a poster about the shared ReIReS data model. This data model ensures the interoperability of the collections to be imported in the unified discovery environment.

To further test and fine-tune the reliability of the data model and technical infrastructure, the LIBIS technical staff is importing more datasets. Besides working on improving the back-end and front-end, work on the user interface has also started.

By 2020 the system should be ready for a demonstration of the basic functionalities. With the help of presentations and by allowing potential users to test the unified discovery environment, feedback will be collected to implement further improvements, alongside new functionalities and importing new datasets.