The third ICEDIG all hands meeting was hosted in Helsinki at LUOMUS, the Finnish Museum of Natural History. ICEDIG work package leaders and project contributors gathered for four days of intensive work meetings, brainstorming sessions and workshops.

On behalf of all participants, we wish to extend our most sincere thanks to the Luomus team for the flawless organization of this event.

Applying markup to web pages makes them machine readable and searchable. Markup using schema.org vocabulary can be applied to web pages so they can be catalogued more logically and discovered more easily.
That is where bioschemas.org is filling an important niche. They are developing schemas that can be used to describe web pages on all aspects of biology, including medicine, biochemistry, genomics, phenomics and taxonomy.

ICEDIG project results are more than just project deliverables, they also include other research output related to digitisation.
Lead author Mathias Dillen from the Meise Botanic Garden, in collaboration with colleagues from the ICEDIG consortium and beyond, recently published a data paper in Biodiversity Data Journal for which they compiled a benchmark dataset of 1,800 herbarium specimen images with their corresponding transcribed data. The open source publication can be found here: https://bdj.pensoft.net/article/31817/

The fourth iteration of the SYNTHESYS projects started on February 1^st 2019, including many ICEDIG project partners.

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 was launched as well on 1 February 2019.

We have the pleasure to announce the first Training School (TS) of the COST Action MOBILISE, organized under WG6 “EDUCATION & TRAINING, DISSEMINATION & OUTREACH”

Digitisation and Data Management Challenges in Small Collections

       14-15 March 2019, Sofia, BG

No registration fees, trainees will receive a fixed COST grant for their travel and accommodation