Late on Friday (29/06) afternoon the ICEDIG consortium received the great news that ESFRI has formally accepted the DiSSCo initiative - for which ICEDIG is a design study - on its 2018 roadmap update, making European Natural Science Collection a recognised priority research infrastructure, supporting scientific excellence and innovation towards urgent societal challenges.

On July, 13th, three days of intense work meetings at the first ICEDIG All Hands meeting came to an end. It brought all project partners and participants together to meet, engage in discussions, promote the exchange of knowledge and experiences, and to coordinate current and future efforts on the ICEDIG work packages and tasks.

The first ICEDIG Roundtable took place on 11 June at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and focused on specifications of a Collection Digitisation Dashboard. Luc Willemse (Naturalis) had invited 20 participants representing CETAF, ICEDIG project partners and external experts. 

Project Coordinator Leif Schulman had the opportunity to present the progress made and the goals of the project at the CETAf43 General Assembly hosted by the Natural History Museum in London, UK. 

With ICEDIG now running its course, the first stakeholder engagement efforts of the project were launched at the highly anticipated ICEDIG Opening Conference which was held on March 6th, 2018. The event was hosted by the Finnish Natural History Museum at the Economicum university premises in Helsinki. Welcoming the audience was LUOMUS Director Leif Schulman who is also the coordinator of ICEDIG.