by Tara Wainwright
5 min read
2025 has been an exciting and busy year for DiSSCo UK. In June, the DiSSCo UK Outline Business Case (OBC) was approved without conditions by the DSIT Investment Committee. This was a tremendous vote of confidence in the programme and, alongside the exceptional feedback received with the official approval, places the programme in a strong position as we prepare to submit the Full Business Case (FBC) in the New Year to unlock £155m in funding and launch the ten-year programme during 2026.
Following OBC approval, three direct grants were submitted by the Natural History Museum to designate funding for the core programme activities. These include the management of programme delivery, including training and support for the consortium; the build, coordination, and management of the technical infrastructure to support the data created by mass digitisation; and the leadership and governance of a catalysis centre to innovate and accelerate digitisation, data services and research.
Alongside the direct grants, the first round of digitisation calls were launched. This was the first of four funding calls that will be held over the ten-years, with greater funding to broaden the scope as the programme progresses.
We want to thank our community for their continued high engagement with the programme during the preparatory stages and we will continue to strengthen the network and engage with all collections as the programme enters the delivery phase. This year, we held six workshops, all of which had over 80 attendees. We ran an Expression of Interest to gauge interest towards participation in the programme, receiving 94 responses. Building on this, a matchmaking workshop, alongside an information booklet with contact details, helped organisations to network and develop their proposals for collection hubs and local and thematic networks that will work together to digitise collections and manage resources.
The DiSSCo UK data portal, built using GBIF infrastructure, continues to grow, with over 3 million new records published in 2025, totalling over 17.8 million UK specimens openly available online. This has largely been achieved due to the ongoing, large-scale digitisation project at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, showing what can be achieved and providing digital access to more than 5 million of their herbarium specimens, with more to come. The start of the DiSSCo UK digitisation programme will maintain this momentum as more organisations digitise and publish their collections, improving access to UK natural science specimens and enabling new, innovative research.
The first pilot publishing data to GBIF and the DiSSCo UK data portal via the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) was successful. The British Geological Survey have published their GB3D dataset, consisting of over four thousand fossil type specimens, most of which have an image and georeference. The GB3D project digitised macrofossil species and subspecies found in the UK and created 3D model images produced by laser scanning the original fossils. After less than a month, the dataset has already had over 200 download events, highlighting the value of digital, easily accessible collections. If you are a UK collection with a ready-to-go dataset that you want to publish, please contact dissco-uk@nhm.ac.uk.
The progress and advancement of DiSSCo UK has been a collaborative effort across the UK. We are hugely thankful to everyone in the DiSSCo UK community who has attended workshops, provided feedback, and shown enthusiasm for the programme. As a community, we will continue to advocate for the importance of the UK’s natural science collections and look forward to an even more exciting 2026.