Institutional benefits of DiSSCo:Building on our experience

DiSSCo Connect, Scheltema, Leiden, NL

15th May 2017

Vince Smith, Head of Informatics, NHM London@vsmithuk and @NHM_Digitise

Natural History collections are our best record of human impact on the natural world

Collections with purpose

Collections that change how we think

Collections to inspire the next generation

Collections at scale

Institutional

Challenges

DigitisationDigitisation

Big data

300M pages 100’s of PB 3D data

Trillions of interactions>700M occurrences

Innovation

Innovation

1. Label identification &

perspective warp

2. Label crop

3. Label merge

4. Finished for OCR or

crowdsourcing

Data management & access

Public engagement

A partnership with Notes from Nature

Part of a wider community of over 1 million users interested in citizen science projects

Data on transcriptions

Data on transcribersCrowdsourcing transcriptions

www.synthesys.info synthesys@nhm.ac.uk

Creating an integrated European infrastructure for researchers in the

natural sciences

SYNTHESYS – FP6 – 2004-200913M€, 20 Partners (66 months)

SYNTHESYS2 – FP7 – 2009-20137.2M€, 20 Partners (48 months)

SYNTHESYS3 – FP7 – 2013-20178M€, 21 Partners (48 months)

>4.5k pubs, 4k projects, >50k research days

Transitioning NH institutions to molecular & digital

Transnational

Access improves

accessibility of natural

history collections

through funded physical

access to

collections/expertise and

facilities.

Joint Research

Activities improve

access to data stored

digitally within NH

collections by extracting

and enhancing data from

digitised collections.

Network Activities deliver collection

management policies, best

practice models, unified

standards and protocols for

new and emerging

collections.

Objectives

Draft INFRAIA-01– 2018/19–H2020: Call for NH community, aligned to DiSSCo

1. Better return on investment, minimising overlapping tasks between

institutions and countries and creating a common knowledge base;

2. Ability to influence the agenda of DiSSCo at central level (participating

in the decision making processes);

3. Improve coordination of cross institutional funding applications, with

better alignment to institutional priorities;

4. Strengthen their case at national level on the value of collections, and

thus be in a better position to attract more funding.

Added value for institutional partners

Key benefits