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of conference poster on Setting Natural Science Data Free: Scoping UK Collections by Tara Wainwright of Natural History Museum Bishops Stortford United Kingdom for SPNHC2022 Conference, Edinburgh. June 5-10th 2022.

of conference oral presentation on Setting Natural Science Data Free: UK Collections' Digital Readiness by Tara Wainwright of Natural History Museum Bishops Stortford United Kingdom for SPNHC2022 Conference, Edinburgh. June 5-10th 2022. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20060648, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20060648

Between September 2021 and March 2022, a consortium across the twelve major regions of the UK, led by the Natural History Museum, London (NHM), participated in a study to develop the business case and plan to support a national programme of natural science collections digitisation. This work, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) sought to understand the size and diversity of UK natural science collections; establish the readiness of UK institutions to undertake digitisation; and develop training materials to pilot regional digitisation, building on prior investments in digitisation and informatics by the NHM. This report sets out the key findings from this work and is presented as a “blueprint” to scale up digitisation and cooperation through a national infrastructure programme: DiSSCo UK is part of the UK’s contribution to DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, a partnership of institutions who share a vision to empower science and society, in balance with nature, to make reliable knowledge and evidence about the natural world available to all.

Digitisation has the potential to create a sustainable and freely accessible resource, unlocking vast amounts of data to be used by researchers across the globe. With a variety of reasons for digitising their natural science collections (NSCs), institutions face a diverse set of digitisation challenges. Understanding the drivers and hurdles for each individual collection is crucial in building an effective strategy and business case for the digitisation of UK collections. As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded scoping project, we distributed two surveys. The first, a survey based on the European SYNTHESYS+ survey, was distributed to NSC holders across the UK. For all institutions, we obtained estimates for the number of biological and geological specimens held in their collections, as well as the extent to which these specimens have been digitised. Further details were provided for some institutions, with 60% of respondents providing a breakdown of their collections by taxonomic group, 51% by preservation type, and 31% by stratigraphy. The second, the digital readiness survey, aims to gain insight into institutions' current digital readiness. The survey was split into four key sections, asking respondents about (1) how natural science digitisation is prioritised within their institution, (2) their institutions’ current capabilities in digitising their collections, (3) the accessibility and management of their collections data, and (4) the training required to increase their institutions’ digital outputs. Here, we will discuss the results of this nationwide scoping exercise. With over 80 responses, we now have the most up-to-date estimate of what is held in UK NSCs, a greater understanding of the level of digitisation across a range of institutions, and the key barriers institutions face when digitising their NSCs.

Data from paper: **Sex biases and the scarcity of sex metadata in global herpetology collections**. [link to paper](). > Tara Wainwright, Morwenna Trevenna, Sarah R. Alewijnse, Patrick D. Campbell, Marc E.H. Jones, Jeff W. Streicher & Natalie Cooper. 2023. Sex biases and the scarcity of sex metadata in global herpetology collections. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. In press. The analyses require the two tidied datasets `all-specimen-data.csv` (unzipped) and `all-extra-data.csv`. Raw data sources used to build these are listed in the metadata. More details can be found at https://github.com/nhcooper123/sex-bias-herps.

The UK’s museums and botanic gardens hold millions of natural history specimens of scientific importance. Unveiling the contents of the UK’s collections will enable further digitisation to unlock the full scientific potential of UK natural science collections (NSCs). This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aimed to discover how many specimens are in UK NSCs, and what those specimens consist of. A survey based on the European SYNTHESYS+ survey was distributed to NSC holders across the UK. To encourage collection holders of all size and capabilities to participate, the survey was graded to allow different levels of granularity. For all institutions, we obtained estimates for the number of biological and geological specimens held in their collections, as well as the extent to which these specimens have been digitised. Further details were provided for some institutions, with 60% of respondents providing a breakdown of their collections by taxonomic group, 51% by preservation type, and 31% by stratigraphy. This poster shows the results of this nationwide scoping exercise and presents a visualisation of the data obtained via a Power BI data dashboard. With 83 responses, we now have the most up-to-date estimate of what is held in UK NSCs and a greater understanding of the level of digitisation across a range of institutions.

MOBILISE Workshop: Joint WG2-WG5 meeting Date: 12 September 2022 Location: Padua, Italy An overview of DiSSCo-UK, one of the national nodes of DiSSCo. In addition to background and context, we describe some of the processes we went through in establishing our node which we hope are at least in part replicable by others. We will discuss our stakeholder vision, and the stages we have gone through to get where we are today.