The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative. DiSSCo aims to bring together natural history collections (NHCs) from over 175 museums, botanical gardens and universities across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that, functioning as a single Europe-wide collection, make the millions of objects hosted in European NHCs physically and digitally open and accessible for all forms of research and innovation, sharing common access, curation, policies and practices across countries while ensuring that all the data complies with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data both for humans and AI systems). A crucial part of DiSSCo's complex data architecture is the comprehensive portfolio of services that it is currently developing across three main categories: a) e-Science Services, b) Physical and Remote Access Services and c) Support and Training Services. Regarding e-science services, DiSSCo will provide a one-stop-shop for services providing discovery, access, interpretation and analysis of complex linked data. All e-services will be provided as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) public offering. Regarding the second category of services, related to physical and remote access services, DiSSCo aims to provide universal, harmonised physical access and digitisation-on-demand services. Physical access is up till today still the main mechanism through which scientists interact with NSCs, but as the digital knowledge base grows, the balance will shift to virtual task such as online remote curation and annotation. DiSSCo will continue supporting physical access, balancing requests for physical access with, for example, digitisation-on-demand or generating new data (e.g. DNA sequences, 3-D or microscopic imaging) that can be associated to the digital specimen objects across the participating DiSSCo facilities. A suite of core e-services (being currently developed under DiSSCo Transition) will support the process of access provision from both the user and the institution (facility) side. Finally, regarding the category of services related to support & training , the focus is on providing a comprehensive user support system for all DiSSCo services and improving digital skills and competencies across the user audiences and supporting career paths for new roles (e.g. digital curators) in the distributed facilities (NSCs). None of the services described above would be possible without the novel technologies and approaches to knowledge management that DiSSCo is currently developing, and which will enable it to achieve its core objective of scaling up knowledge production and broadening the spectrum of users, increasing participation and accessibility of biodiversity and geodiversity knowledge. Among the new technologies and concepts that DiSSCo is developing, the notion of digital specimen is paramount. The Digital Specimen can be seen as a “digital twin” of a real-life specimen, one that, simply put, aims to digitally replicate the experience of an in-person visit to the collection. It is in fact an enriched experience, given that, far from limiting itself to providing the conventional information that is contained in the specimen tag, the digital twin provides a wide array of other different types of data about the physical specimen that it represents, including taxonomic data, genomic data, biochemical data, images, etc. from multiple sources on different locations. All of it on the click of a button. In providing universal physical and virtual access to interlinked data from a vast community of NHCs across Europe, DiSSCo will transform today’s landscape of collection-based research. From a scenario of individual European natural collections providing simple access to various data classes into a new reality: a comprehensive and sustainable Europe-wide knowledge base of unprecedented scale that links all data classes across institutions.