by Tara Wainwright
5 min read
2024 has been a pivotal year for DiSSCo UK. Our 10-year, £155.6 million programme to unlock the potential of UK natural science collections was formally announced in March by the then Secretary of State as part of a wider investment into UKRI’s research infrastructure roadmap. DiSSCo UK will catalyse a treasure trove of data about millions of natural science specimens, enabling researchers from around the world to use museum collections to find solutions to global problems. Following the announcement, the DiSSCo UK team across NHM and the Arts and Humanities Research Council have developed an Outline Business Case for approval to unlock the funding, which involves outlining the benefits, affordability, and deliverability, of the programme. We are very grateful for the high engagement in the community workshop sessions, as this has enabled strong representation of the UK natural science collections community throughout the OBC.
Alongside the development of the business case, we have been enhancing our existing infrastructure. The DiSSCo UK data portal was merged with our website to create a central resource for all DiSSCo UK-related data, activities and information. The data portal has continued to grow with 14.7 million UK specimens accessible online, and we look forward to further growth as the DiSSCo UK programme progresses. Adjacent to the data portal growth, we have also improved UK representation on the Global Registry of Scientific Collections to make UK natural science collections more discoverable, with over 40 records either created or updated.
This improved community representation on GBIF and our portal reflects the continued growth of the DiSSCo UK network as we expand our reach with new organisations learning about, and becoming involved with, DiSSCo UK. Partnership with the community is being formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding, which outlines our shared vision for a national partnership to develop DiSSCo UK as a research infrastructure and deliver a major digitisation programme.
A further result of the expanding and strengthening community is our enhanced understanding of the contents of UK natural science collections. Following an initial survey of UK collections in 2021, this year we updated the data to encompass more collections and greater detail. With data on 21 new collections and 11 updated collections, our insight into what is held in the UK, and therefore what we can digitise, has improved. The updated data can be found on the UK Collections Dashboard.
We are grateful for the support and enthusiasm for DiSSCo UK in 2024 and are excited to continue to work with programme partners to further progress the business case and planning in 2025.