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A presentation about digitisation coordination at the Natural History Museum, London, covering targets & measurement; prioritisation; strategic fit; project management; economic benefits; and working together in the UK and internationally.

of conference oral presentation on Measuring the economic impacts of digitised collections by Helen Hardy of The Natural History Museum, London London 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.

In order to support the digitisation activities of DiSSCo, we have considered how best to prepare collections for digitisation, digitise them, curate their associated data, publish those data, and measure the outputs of projects and programmes. We have examined options and approaches for different types and sizes of collections, when outsourcing should be considered, and what different project management approaches are most appropriate in this range of circumstances. This report describes the approach we have taken to developing an online community-edited manual, our guidelines, other relevant resources and platforms, and a set of recommendations on how to develop and this work to enhance future digitisation capacity across DiSSCo collectionholding organisations. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Helen Hardy presentation to the SPNHC (Society for the preservation of natural history collections) conference 2022 about measuring the economic benefits of digitising natural history collections.

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.

Presentation from the Natural History Museum, London for BioDigiCon 2022 workshop ' Digitization Coordination: Combining Project Management & Digitization Efforts to Benefit Collections, Big and Small ' https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/BioDigiCon_2022

Pitch to the Winner's Conference of the World Summit Awards 2019-20, setting out the importance of the digital collections programme at the Natural History Museum London

This Milestone 3.2 report for DiSSCo Prepare Work Package 3 Task 3.1 sets out the initial design blueprint for a DiSSCo Digital Maturity Self-Assessment Tool, building on the analyses in the Milestone 3.1 report ‘Improving Digital Capability - Case Studies and Analysis’ (Hardy et al, Dec 2020) and in the Milestone 3.3. Report, including consideration of two existing tools in our sector. This tool is intended to support teams, institutions and national nodes in developing organisational readiness for provision of the DiSSCo services and data, helping them to identify and target areas for improvement. The aim is for this to tie in to future provision of training and support, as well as helping to identify the gaps at aggregate level where that training may be most useful. In addition , we believe there is a case for a platform that can support both this and the related Task 7.3 Policy Tool, such that these or other tools are consistent for users and can interact with one another where relevant, avoiding any duplication. This blueprint is intended for wider discussion among the DiSSCo members, so that tool content can be developed in more detail as part of the Deliverable for this Task info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

What has the Natural History Museum, London, learning from 5 years digitising collections? Presentation introducing the Digitisation Next session at the Biodiversity Next Conference, Leiden 2019

Invited Keynote for the ICEDIG Final Conference (www.icedig.eu), exploring what 'digital by default' could mean in the context of natural history collections and why digitisation could be about processes and access as well as objects.

Invited presentation for the British Library Open & Engaged open data conference 2019, discussing the digitisation and data mobilisation of the collections at the Natural History Museum London

This report aims to describe the proposed content for a DiSSCo Digital Maturity Self-Assessment Tool, to support development and discussion with potential users. It defines the levels against which users will assess (‘score’) their current and target capability under each category; defines the categories and subcategories that will form the structure of the tool questions / assessment; provides full text examples of category content - i.e. the text that will be seen by users to guide them in identifying the right current and target levels for their team or institution’s capability in that category; and provides more depth about the requirements for accessing the tool (registration etc) and the reports that the tool might generate. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This Deliverable report summarises the key insights and recommendations from DiSSCo Prepare Task 3.1, which looked at digital skills, competencies and capabilities across individuals and organisations, as part of the wider Work Package on capacity enhancement. This task looked at insights from previous DiSSCo linked projects; a wide range of competency framework examples; sources of data about individual and organisational capabilities; and capacity building for organisations leading to the key recommendation of a DiSSCo Digital Maturity Tool. These insights are already being used as inputs to other Tasks in DiSSCo Prepare, showing the key role of capability in the broadest sense in underpinning the DiSSCo digital transformation. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Slides used for a presentation to the West Lakes U3A Group in August 2021 about digitising collections at the Natural HIstory Museum, London

DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) mobilising, unifying bio- and geo-diversity information connected to the specimens held in natural science collections and delivering it to scientific communities and beyond. Bringing together 120 institutions across 21 countries and combining earlier investments in data interoperability practices with technological advancements in digitisation, cloud services and semantic linking, DiSSCo makes the data from natural science collections available as one virtual data cloud, connected with data emerging from new techniques and not already linked to specimens. These new data include DNA barcodes, whole genome sequences, proteomics and metabolomics data, chemical data, trait data, and imaging data (Computer-assisted Tomography (CT), Synchrotron, etc.), to name but a few; and will lead to a wide range of end-user services that begins with finding, accessing, using and improving data. DiSSCo will deliver the diagnostic information required for novel approaches and new services that will transform the landscape of what is possible in ways that are hard to imagine today. With approximately 1.5 billion objects to be digitised, bringing natural science collections to the information age is expected to result in many tens of petabytes of new data over the next decades, used on average by 5,000 – 15,000 unique users every day. This requires new skills, clear policies and robust procedures and new technologies to create, work with and manage large digital datasets over their entire research data lifecycle, including their long-term storage and preservation and open access. Such processes and procedures must match and be derived from the latest thinking in open science and data management, realising the core principles of 'findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable' (FAIR). Synthesised from results of the ICEDIG project ("Innovation and Consolidation for Large Scale Digitisation of Natural Heritage", EU Horizon 2020 grant agreement No. 777483) the DiSSCo Conceptual Design Blueprint covers the organisational arrangements, processes and practices, the architecture, tools and technologies, culture, skills and capacity building and governance and business model proposals for constructing the digitisation infrastructure of DiSSCo. In this context, the digitisation infrastructure of DiSSCo must be interpreted as that infrastructure (machinery, processing, procedures, personnel, organisation) offering Europe-wide capabilities for mass digitisation and digitisation-on-demand, and for the subsequent management (i.e., curation, publication, processing) and use of the resulting data. The blueprint constitutes the essential background needed to continue work to raise the overall maturity of the DiSSCo Programme across multiple dimensions (organisational, technical, scientific, data, financial) to achieve readiness to begin construction. Today, collection digitisation efforts have reached most collection-holding institutions across Europe. Much of the leadership and many of the people involved in digitisation and working with digital collections wish to take steps forward and expand the efforts to benefit further from the already noticeable positive effects. The collective results of examining technical, financial, policy and governance aspects show the way forward to operating a large distributed initiative i.e., the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) for natural science collections across Europe. Ample examples, opportunities and need for innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage have been described. The blueprint makes one hundred and four (104) recommendations to be considered by other elements of the DiSSCo Programme of linked projects (i.e., SYNTHESYS+, COST MOBILISE, DiSSCo Prepare, and others to follow) and the DiSSCo Programme leadership as the journey towards organisational, technical, scientific, data and financial readiness continues. Nevertheless, significant obstacles must be overcome as a matter of priority if DiSSCo is to move beyond its Design and Preparatory Phases during 2024. Specifically, these include: Organisational: Strengthen common purpose by adopting a common framework for policy harmonisation and capacity enhancement across broad areas, especially in respect of digitisation strategy and prioritisation, digitisation processes and techniques, data and digital media publication and open access, protection of and access to sensitive data, and administration of access and benefit sharing. Pursue the joint ventures and other relationships necessary to the successful delivery of the DiSSCo mission, especially ventures with GBIF and other international and regional digitisation and data aggregation organisations, in the context of infrastructure policy frameworks, such as EOSC. Proceed with the explicit aim of avoiding divergences of approach in global natural science collections data management and research. Strengthen common purpose by adopting a common framework for policy harmonisation and capacity enhancement across broad areas, especially in respect of digitisation strategy and prioritisation, digitisation processes and techniques, data and digital media publication and open access, protection of and access to sensitive data, and administration of access and benefit sharing. Pursue the joint ventures and other relationships necessary to the successful delivery of the DiSSCo mission, especially ventures with GBIF and other international and regional digitisation and data aggregation organisations, in the context of infrastructure policy frameworks, such as EOSC. Proceed with the explicit aim of avoiding divergences of approach in global natural science collections data management and research. Technical: Adopt and enhance the DiSSCo Digital Specimen Architecture and, specifically as a matter of urgency, establish the persistent identifier scheme to be used by DiSSCo and (ideally) other comparable regional initiatives. Establish (software) engineering development and (infrastructure) operations team and direction essential to the delivery of services and functionalities expected from DiSSCo such that earnest engineering can lead to an early start of DiSSCo operations. Adopt and enhance the DiSSCo Digital Specimen Architecture and, specifically as a matter of urgency, establish the persistent identifier scheme to be used by DiSSCo and (ideally) other comparable regional initiatives. Establish (software) engineering development and (infrastructure) operations team and direction essential to the delivery of services and functionalities expected from DiSSCo such that earnest engineering can lead to an early start of DiSSCo operations. Scientific: Establish a common digital research agenda leveraging Digital (extended) Specimens as anchoring points for all specimen-associated and -derived information, demonstrating to research institutions and policy/decision-makers the new possibilities, opportunities and value of participating in the DiSSCo research infrastructure. Establish a common digital research agenda leveraging Digital (extended) Specimens as anchoring points for all specimen-associated and -derived information, demonstrating to research institutions and policy/decision-makers the new possibilities, opportunities and value of participating in the DiSSCo research infrastructure. Data: Adopt the FAIR Digital Object Framework and the International Image Interoperability Framework as the low entropy means to achieving uniform access to rich data (image and non-image) that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Develop and promote best practice approaches towards achieving the best digitisation results in terms of quality (best, according to agreed minimum information and other specifications), time (highest throughput, fast), and cost (lowest, minimal per specimen). Adopt the FAIR Digital Object Framework and the International Image Interoperability Framework as the low entropy means to achieving uniform access to rich data (image and non-image) that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Develop and promote best practice approaches towards achieving the best digitisation results in terms of quality (best, according to agreed minimum information and other specifications), time (highest throughput, fast), and cost (lowest, minimal per specimen). Financial Broaden attractiveness (i.e., improve bankability) of DiSSCo as an infrastructure to invest in. Plan for finding ways to bridge the funding gap to avoid disruptions in the critical funding path that risks interrupting core operations; especially when the gap opens between the end of preparations and beginning of implementation due to unsolved political difficulties. Broaden attractiveness (i.e., improve bankability) of DiSSCo as an infrastructure to invest in. Plan for finding ways to bridge the funding gap to avoid disruptions in the critical funding path that risks interrupting core operations; especially when the gap opens between the end of preparations and beginning of implementation due to unsolved political difficulties. Strategically, it is vital to balance the multiple factors addressed by the blueprint against one another to achieve the desired goals of the DiSSCo programme. Decisions cannot be taken on one aspect alone without considering other aspects, and here the various governance structures of DiSSCo (General Assembly, advisory boards, and stakeholder forums) play a critical role over the coming years.

This report investigates the current state of physical (mechanical) robotics, automated warehousing approaches and assistive technologies in relation to the storage, handling and digitisation of natural history collections. While ‘robots’ may sound futuristic, there are many existing examples of automation in the natural history and cultural heritage sectors, and this is growing rapidly. While purely software-based automation is outside the scope of this paper, hardware in use includes everything from barcodes and conveyor belts for digisation; to imaging technologies that need not always be supervised; robots that handle multiple vials for molecular and genetic work; and use of robots in display / exhibition contexts e.g. for 3D printing. While automated storage and retrieval have not yet been applied in natural history collections (to the best of our knowledge), several case studies of automation from e-commerce and the library sector are explored in this study, as well as examples of robotic arms in the heritage sector. Robots and other automated systems are very good at repetitive tasks, and are developing rapidly to be able to handle more complex object types, at a lower cost. High volume, high variety of objects, and considerations such as fragility are not unique to the natural history sector - they apply for example to major retail operations - however natural history collections do offer some of the more extreme examples of these challenges, and in particular are not replaceable in the way many other objects can be. Business cases for automation in our sector also need to take into account that our processing times are often not critical in the way they can be for commercial operations, although they are becoming more so, particularly in digisation and as our resources continue to be limited - digisation on demand is likely to come with expectations about response time, for example. Besides automation of object handling and imaging, warehousing automation can improve retrieval times from storage, space efficiency and climate control. However, implementation of automated warehousing solutions would require significant adaptations of existing storage space. This option may be of greater interest when new storage spaces are being built, and there may be the opportunity to move to more standardised storage units that can more readily be handled automatically. At this time, a fully automated solution from storage to imaging and back to storage is not realistic for the complex context of natural history collections. By developing independent components (including storage & retrieval, transport, object picking, and imaging) which can be connected in the future, progress can already be made towards an end-to-end solution. The natural history sector will need to work with suppliers and subject matter experts, including innovative smaller companies, because they have the required expertise to develop and integrate components. These suppliers will need to be provided with clear requirements and information if they are to understand our requirements, perhaps through shared research and development approaches and piloting. DiSSCo, and its Centers of Excellence, could play a further role in developing the expertise to beer communicate with SMEs. Also, DiSSCo can lead a concentrated effort for research and development in this field, to make sure that the various pilot projects are aligned. Institutions holding natural history collections are likely to find many potential uses for automation, each with their own specific business case that will need to be developed - in this context, it is particularly important to consider the desired outcomes, including e.g. the benefits to humans of automating more repetitive aspects of their work.

The SYNTHESYS consortium has been operational since 2004, and has facilitated physical access by individual researchers to European natural history collections through its Transnational Access programme (TA). For the first time, SYNTHESYS+ will be offering virtual access to collections through digitisation, with two calls for the programme, the first in 2020 and the second in 2021. The Virtual Access (VA) programme is not a direct digital parallel of Transnational Access - proposals for collections digitisation will be prioritised and carried out based on community demand, and data must be made openly available immediately. A key feature of Virtual Access is that, unlike TA, it does not select the researchers to whom access is provided. Because Virtual Access in this way is new to the community and to the collections-holding institutions, the SYNTHESYS+ consortium invited ideas through an Ideas Call, that opened on 7th October 2019 and closed on 22nd November 2019, in order to assess interest and to trial procedures. This report is intended to provide feedback to those who participated in the Ideas Call and to help all applicants to the first SYNTHESYS+Virtual Access Call that will be launched on 20th of February 2020.

Digitisation of natural science collections is fundamental to the vision for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), and given the low proportion of collections digitally accessible, it is proposed that ‘Centres of Excellence’ be developed to accelerate the creation of digital copies of original specimens. Within the ICEDIG project, a team of scientists from across the consortium explored the concept of Centres of Excellence and have constructed a toolset to help identify these centres to support the development of DiSSCo. This report documents this process and describes the toolset.

Presentation to Wikimedia UK AGM 2018 about collections digitisation and data release at the Natural History Museum, London

In this thesis, the response of a provincial government's budgetary decisions with respect to changes in Federal conditional and unconditional grants was investigated with special reference to whether or not the responses of a high income province (Ontario) differed from those of a low income province (New Brunswick). In order to facilitate the analysis, a theoretical framework (called Model I) was set forth in which a province's expenditure and tax responses to changes in net provincial product and Federal grants could be derived. Using this framework, separate equations were estimated for Ontario and for New Brunswick for those expenditures aided by the National Health Grant Program, the Trans-Canada Highway Program, the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Program, and the categorical welfare programs and the Canada Assistance Plan; and for other aided expenditures, unaided expenditures, and revenue. Since expenditure data were not available according to the definitions required for Model I, separate expenditure equations could not be estimated, within the context of Model I, for education, fish and game, forest~ and lands (settlement and agriculture). Thus, an alternative framework (called Model II) was developed. In Model II, these data difficulties were taken into account through a reformulation of the province's quadratic utility function; this allowed the magnitude of the conditional and unconditional grant coefficients to be derived and interpreted prior to estimation. Nine expenditure equations and one revenue equation were estimated for Ontario and for New Brunswick within the framework of Model II. The major difference between the dependent variables used in Model I and Medel II is that in the latter the dependent expenditure variable for each program area considered separately allows the inclusion of expenditures which may be both aided and unaided whereas in Model I the dependent variable for programs considered separately properly includes expenditures only on those goods and services which are specifically aided by federal conditional grants. On the basis of the empirical estimates of Models I and II, the following conclusions may be drawn: first, Ontario and New Brunswick do not appear to respond to changes in Federal conditional and unconditional grants in the same manner. For example, the empirical estimates of Model I reveal that only New Brunswick's expenditures responded as predicted to the receipt of Federal limited conditional grants in the three limited grant programs considered separately, namely, the General Health Grants' Program, hospital construction, and the Trans-Canada Highway. On the other hand, the empirical estimates of Model II indicate that Federal conditional grants for hospital construction, hospital insurance and diagnostic services, social welfare, and lands (settlement and agriculture) stimulated both provinces' expenditures in these areas during the period from 1948 to 1970; and that Federal grants for the Trans-Canada Highway encouraged Ontario's total road expenditures while gr'-nts received under the General Health Grants' Progran and under the various forestry programs stimulated New Brunswick's expenditures on general and public health and on forests, respectively. With regard to unconditional grants, only Ontario's expenditures on education and New Brunswick's expenditures on lands (settlement and agriculture) were stimulated by their receipt. A second conclusion is that conditional grants stimulate spending on individual programs to a greater degree than do unconditional grants; and, third, unconditional grants are used as a substitute for own source revenue in the case of New Brunswick. In addition, the theoretical models' predictions that a province responds to the same extent to changes in net provincial product and unconditional federal grants is supported in the case of both Ontario and New Brunswick. Thesis Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The SYNTHESYS consortium has been operational since 2004, and has facilitated physical access by individual researchers to European natural history collections through its Transnational Access programme (TA). For the first time, SYNTHESYS+ will be offering virtual access to collections through digitisation, with two calls for the programme, the first in 2020 and the second in 2021. The Virtual Access (VA) programme is not a direct digital parallel of Transnational Access - proposals for collections digitisation will be prioritised and carried out based on community demand, and data must be made openly available immediately. A key feature of Virtual Access is that, unlike TA, it does not select the researchers to whom access is provided. Because Virtual Access in this way is new to the community and to the collections-holding institutions, the SYNTHESYS+ consortium invited ideas through an Ideas Call, that opened on 7th October 2019 and closed on 22nd November 2019, in order to assess interest and to trial procedures. This report is intended to provide feedback to those who participated in the Ideas Call and to help all applicants to the first SYNTHESYS+Virtual Access Call that will be launched on 20th of February 2020.

This report investigates the current state of physical (mechanical) robotics, automated warehousing approaches and assistive technologies in relation to the storage, handling and digitisation of natural history collections. While ‘robots’ may sound futuristic, there are many existing examples of automation in the natural history and cultural heritage sectors, and this is growing rapidly. While purely software-based automation is outside the scope of this paper, hardware in use includes everything from barcodes and conveyor belts for digisation; to imaging technologies that need not always be supervised; robots that handle multiple vials for molecular and genetic work; and use of robots in display / exhibition contexts e.g. for 3D printing. While automated storage and retrieval have not yet been applied in natural history collections (to the best of our knowledge), several case studies of automation from e-commerce and the library sector are explored in this study, as well as examples of robotic arms in the heritage sector. Robots and other automated systems are very good at repetitive tasks, and are developing rapidly to be able to handle more complex object types, at a lower cost. High volume, high variety of objects, and considerations such as fragility are not unique to the natural history sector - they apply for example to major retail operations - however natural history collections do offer some of the more extreme examples of these challenges, and in particular are not replaceable in the way many other objects can be. Business cases for automation in our sector also need to take into account that our processing times are often not critical in the way they can be for commercial operations, although they are becoming more so, particularly in digisation and as our resources continue to be limited - digisation on demand is likely to come with expectations about response time, for example. Besides automation of object handling and imaging, warehousing automation can improve retrieval times from storage, space efficiency and climate control. However, implementation of automated warehousing solutions would require significant adaptations of existing storage space. This option may be of greater interest when new storage spaces are being built, and there may be the opportunity to move to more standardised storage units that can more readily be handled automatically. At this time, a fully automated solution from storage to imaging and back to storage is not realistic for the complex context of natural history collections. By developing independent components (including storage & retrieval, transport, object picking, and imaging) which can be connected in the future, progress can already be made towards an end-to-end solution. The natural history sector will need to work with suppliers and subject matter experts, including innovative smaller companies, because they have the required expertise to develop and integrate components. These suppliers will need to be provided with clear requirements and information if they are to understand our requirements, perhaps through shared research and development approaches and piloting. DiSSCo, and its Centers of Excellence, could play a further role in developing the expertise to beer communicate with SMEs. Also, DiSSCo can lead a concentrated effort for research and development in this field, to make sure that the various pilot projects are aligned. Institutions holding natural history collections are likely to find many potential uses for automation, each with their own specific business case that will need to be developed - in this context, it is particularly important to consider the desired outcomes, including e.g. the benefits to humans of automating more repetitive aspects of their work., {"references":["Tausch R., Schmedt H., Santos P., Schröner M., Fellner D.W. (2016) 3DHOG for Geometric Similarity Measurement and Retrieval on Digital Cultural Heritage Archives. In: Pietro G., Gallo L., Howle R., Jain L. (eds) Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services 2016. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 55. Springer, Cham"]}

This report investigates the current state of physical (mechanical) robotics, automated warehousing approaches and assistive technologies in relation to the storage, handling and digitisation of natural history collections. While ‘robots’ may sound futuristic, there are many existing examples of automation in the natural history and cultural heritage sectors, and this is growing rapidly. While purely software-based automation is outside the scope of this paper, hardware in use includes everything from barcodes and conveyor belts for digisation; to imaging technologies that need not always be supervised; robots that handle multiple vials for molecular and genetic work; and use of robots in display / exhibition contexts e.g. for 3D printing. While automated storage and retrieval have not yet been applied in natural history collections (to the best of our knowledge), several case studies of automation from e-commerce and the library sector are explored in this study, as well as examples of robotic arms in the heritage sector. Robots and other automated systems are very good at repetitive tasks, and are developing rapidly to be able to handle more complex object types, at a lower cost. High volume, high variety of objects, and considerations such as fragility are not unique to the natural history sector - they apply for example to major retail operations - however natural history collections do offer some of the more extreme examples of these challenges, and in particular are not replaceable in the way many other objects can be. Business cases for automation in our sector also need to take into account that our processing times are often not critical in the way they can be for commercial operations, although they are becoming more so, particularly in digisation and as our resources continue to be limited - digisation on demand is likely to come with expectations about response time, for example. Besides automation of object handling and imaging, warehousing automation can improve retrieval times from storage, space efficiency and climate control. However, implementation of automated warehousing solutions would require significant adaptations of existing storage space. This option may be of greater interest when new storage spaces are being built, and there may be the opportunity to move to more standardised storage units that can more readily be handled automatically. At this time, a fully automated solution from storage to imaging and back to storage is not realistic for the complex context of natural history collections. By developing independent components (including storage & retrieval, transport, object picking, and imaging) which can be connected in the future, progress can already be made towards an end-to-end solution. The natural history sector will need to work with suppliers and subject matter experts, including innovative smaller companies, because they have the required expertise to develop and integrate components. These suppliers will need to be provided with clear requirements and information if they are to understand our requirements, perhaps through shared research and development approaches and piloting. DiSSCo, and its Centers of Excellence, could play a further role in developing the expertise to beer communicate with SMEs. Also, DiSSCo can lead a concentrated effort for research and development in this field, to make sure that the various pilot projects are aligned. Institutions holding natural history collections are likely to find many potential uses for automation, each with their own specific business case that will need to be developed - in this context, it is particularly important to consider the desired outcomes, including e.g. the benefits to humans of automating more repetitive aspects of their work.