UK DiSSCo PREPARE: the UK Distributed System of Scientific Collections Preparatory Project

With this proposal, we mark the end of this scoping phase for DiSSCo UK and enter the project's preparatory phase. This follows two years of systematic and complex work by the UK Natural Science Collection Community, coordinated by the Natural History Museum London and supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, during which we have built up a comprehensive picture of UK collections (https://bit.ly/dissco-uk); built a network of institutions and a community with a shared vision to digitise their collections; developed a blueprint for the digitisation of these collections; revealed a minimum of £2 billion in economic benefits unlocked by digitisation (https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.7.e78844); and explored models to train the UK network to develop the capacity to digitise collections. With our most recent tranche of funding, we have also constructed the first national Data Portal for natural science collections (https://data.dissco-uk.org/), aggregating some 11 million records and building a full, high-quality register of UK collections.

UK DiSSCo PREPARE will start to develop the the national infrastructure proposal that will support the digitisation of between 65 and 100 million specimens, unlocking UK collections and enabling major programmes of research and activity that make use of this data. Building towards that infrastructure, this project will enhance our portal infrastructure, testing our Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) to facilitate data publishing via the DiSSCo UK Data Portal. It will support DiSSCo UK partners, continuing digitisation pilots and work to understand local priorities and needs, while laying the groundwork for a 'hub and spoke' delivery model. And it will provide targetted support to empower thematic user communities such as the earth sciences and humanities, through workshops and augmentation of other relevant data portals.