The European Culture Collections' Organisation: promoting collaboration, opportunities and innovation

Abstract

The European Culture Collections' Organisation (ECCO) was established in 1981. The aim of the organisation is to promote collaboration and exchange of ideas and information about ali aspects of culture collection activity. ECCO meetings are held annually and are a valuable forum for discussion and innovation on the future development of member collection activities. The organization has evolved for an important think tank with important contributions through collaborative projects like the MINE EU project in the mid-1980s to bundle the comrnon interests of microbial service collections and their users. ln the subsequent CABRI EU project, some of the leading collections in Europe made available the contents of their individual catalogues for comparison via a search engine which provides access to a comrnon Catalogue (http://www.cabri.org/CABRI!srs-doc/index.html). Later on, the EBRCN EU project focused on guidelines for best practice towards an ISO-compliant quality management. These outputs were key-elements for the OECD initiative related with the BRCs task-force and the current OECD guidelines for BRCs. More recently, the EMbaRC project enlarged the spectrum of activities and dealt with contemporary topics such as biological safety, improved identification methods and the development new concepts on training and education. The European Microbial DNA Network was also launched as major contribution of this project. (http://www.microdnabank.e!!L). Finally, inside of ECCO organisation another important developed project is the current MIRRI. This cascade of projects has had ECCO as incubator and severa! Culture Collections as lead partners. Moreover, documents that have addressed legal framework of Culture Collection operation, like MTA were also developed inside ECCO and a core MTA is now available to ali Culture Collections that want adhere. Certainly that many other topics are in discussion inside of ECCO, like the implications of Nagoya Protocol and with regards the deposit of non-type materiais in collections.