The third ICEDIG Round Table meeting investigated how robotics could decrease processing time and costs, as well as supporting on-demand remote digitisation. The focus was on physical robotics and automated warehousing, not on software ‘robots’ or automated processes such as Optical Character Recognition. The use of Robotics and warehousing systems covers all stages of the retrieval and digitisation of objects; from preparation to the transport of the object to the digitisation space, the digitisation process itself, the transport back to the collection storage and all actions in between needed to complete the digitisation process.

More than thirty participants came together at the Botanic Garden Meise in Belgium to participate in three intensive days of collaborative work on the ICEDIG project to tackle the many challenges for the digitisation of Natural Science collections across Europe and set the course for DiSSCo, the first pan-European Research Infrastructure initiative to position these collections at the centre of data-driven scientific excellence and innovation.

ICEDIG’s second All Hands Meeting kicked off at the Botanical Garden Meise on the 4th of December 2018. The Castle of Bouchout, situated inside the walls of the Botanical Gardens Domain forms the inspiring venue for three days of intensive work for the project partners. The first day of the meeting was comprised of the ICEDIG General Assembly and the External Expert Advisory Board (EEAB) meeting, chaired by project coordinator Leif Schulman.

The fourth iteration of the SYNTHESYS projects is set to start on February 1st 2019, this time with CETAF as a partner. One key component of the projects was the provision of transnational access to natural history collections. This has not changed with the new project, SYNTHESYS+. Along with the start of the project the first call for physical access will be launched as well on 1 February 2019.

The ICEDIG project seeks for novel ways to speed up digitisation. Pinned insects are a particular challenge, as they are essentially 3-dimensional objects, considering the fact that also their associated labels need to be digitised. The project has scoped six experiments that could possibly lead to innovations in speeding up insect digitization. These are described in the below document MS11. The project now seeks subcontractors to build prototypes of these and other potential approaches.