This project report was written as a formal Milestone (MS45) as part of Task 7.2 of the ICEDIG Project. It was previously made available to project partners and submitted to the European Commision as a report on 29 June 2019. While the differences between these versions are minor the authors consider this the definitive version of the report.

A workshop was held during the 3^rd All-Hands meeting, including representatives from all participating ICEDIG institutes (Suppl. material 1). The goal was to consider what makes a digitisation ‘Centre of Excellence’ by reviewing three potential hub models (Continental, National, and Institutional) and outlining recommendations for which may be the most appropriate for supporting DiSSCo. The key discussion points were:

• Definition of a Centre of Excellence and the proposed attributes it should offer.
• A review of possible existing examples.
• Target audience for the report: DiSSco National Task Forces (NTFs), DiSSCo governance & steering group.
• Strengths and weaknesses of proposed models.

It was concluded that digitisation services should be mapped to different hub models, with a non-prescriptive design approach to identifying Centres of Excellence. Subsequent actions included the integration of outputs relating to digitisation capacities from across the ICEDIG project which are summarised by Hardisty et al. (2020). The need to further identify the audience for the milestone, and services which would benefit from centralisation, were also established as open issues.

This second workshop aimed to review the draft models for DiSSCo Centres of Excellence (described below) which were developed following the ICEDIG All-Hands Meeting. These were presented to meeting participants for feedback and improvement. Points for discussion included:

• Reviewing the list of proposed digitisation services.
• Reviewing the milestone and report structure.
• Use of a more granular service matrix to assess thematic and context-specific models.
• The potential role of commercial organisations within Centres of Excellence.
• Consideration of time-frames: what is expected of a Centre of Excellence in 2, 5 and 10 years and would a Centre operate over a fixed duration (i.e. close after the digitisation of a collection is complete)?

The conclusions and subsequent collaborative review of the draft report have been integrated into a matrix highlighting the appropriateness of delivering a service at different organisational levels.

Drawing on previous work by Cocks et al. (2020), outputs from other ICEDIG work packages (e.g. capacity building in Hardisty et al. 2020) and institutional/community experience, a high-level list of digitisation-related services was identified as potential offerings for a Centre of Excellence. These are summarised in Table 1 with descriptions in Suppl. material 4.

Based on existing digitisation infrastructures globally and within the European scope of DiSSCo, a number of organisational levels were identified at which a Centre of Excellence might operate. Although there is a certain amount of overlap between the different levels, these have been broadly defined, for the purposes of this report, as:

• Institutional: a single institution (e.g. Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, NHM London)
• Regional: small, geographically linked infrastructures that may have ongoing collaborations, shared programmes and/or services
• National: country-level infrastructures (e.g. DCOLL - Germany, e-ReColNat - France)
• Pan-European: international consortia of any size (2 or more countries) thus encompassing smaller collaborations or larger infrastructures

These four levels were assessed against each of the services outlined in the previous section, and assigned a fitness score from 0 (‘inapplicable’) to 3 (‘high’), with comments on the rationale behind the score. The initial analysis is provided in Suppl. material 2.

This method can be used to identify clusters of services that are a good fit at a particular organisational level. This provides an indication of the different types of Centre of Excellence that may logically be formed and implemented at different organisational levels within the DiSSCo framework.

While this methodology provides a relatively coarse framework for defining Centres of Excellence, workshop discussions also raised some more nuanced contexts which might influence the fit between services and operational levels. A common case was that of thematic Centres of Excellence, where services focus on specific collections constrained by characteristics such as object type, taxonomy and geographic regions, and the related digitisation workflows and domain expertise. Such specialisms can potentially have influence on factors like funding models, legislative and legal requirements, availability of facilities and logistics that differ from the more generic model. There are also regional contexts to be considered, where the fit between services and organisational levels may be influenced by patterns of local and national funding, institutional expertise and regional differences in collections management practices. This having been said, Centres of Excellence should follow a principle of harmonising differences in practices across thematic, geographic and community boundaries where possible and beneficial.

The variables involved in applying the additional dimensions are too numerous to address within the scope of this work. However, a framework to evaluate each factor involved in matching services to organisational levels in greater detail could be used to structure these more contextual assessments. A basic example of how this might be approached is shown in Suppl. material 3.

The WP7 group discussed at length the critical role commercial organisations might play within the context of DiSSCo Centres of Excellence. A number of commercial organisations (including ICEDIG partners) have been a key driver in the development of technologies critical to the delivery of high throughput specimen digitisation and in some cases these organisations have become major providers of collections digitisation services. These organisations are likely to continue to play a critical role within DiSSCo, supporting both the innovation of process and the provision of capacity necessary to transform access to natural science collections. Given this, it begs the question as to whether commercial organisations could become DiSSCo Centres of Excellence. The ICEDIG WP7 group concluded that while this was not impossible, any proposal for a commercial entity to become a DiSSCo Centre of Excellence would need to robustly address four key questions that potentially conflict with the principles of DiSSCo:

The heatmap assessment (Fig. 1) using the service-level matrix reveals clusters of related services with greater suitability at different organisational levels. A summary can be seen in Table 2.

Figure 1.  

Heat map matrix of Center of Excellence services versus organizational levels.

Operational digitisation services (see Table 1) demonstrate increased suitability at the institutional and to some extent regional levels. These services are typically facilitated by geographic proximity of collections and infrastructure. Established cost models and workflows need to accommodate diverse processes and therefore tend to require customisation at the institutional level. Two exceptions which score highly at all levels are specimen logistics management and transcription and translation services. The latter may benefit both from a distributed range of greater and varied resources, as well as from localised scientific and/or linguistic specialisations. The only service considered inapplicable at the 'institutional' level was pre-accession digitisation - proposed as a ‘clearing house’ model to digitise specimens before they are received by institutions as by definition it would not be possible and lends itself to a national model.

Programme services encompass training programmes, funding support, networks and communications, as well as development of case studies and new workflows. This cluster was generally biased towards a pan-European or national model. Distribution of resources across a network aids the sustainability of training programmes, whilst advocacy and networking activities are also aided by a distributed model. Funding is facilitated by the existence of collaborations and infrastructures, and a greater range of funding sources can be accessed by linked networks. The development of new workflows and techniques was acknowledged to be easier to develop at the institutional level, but also strengthened by the diversity within pan-European networks. Despite the preference towards more distributed models, all services in this category with the exception of communications and advocacy scored ‘medium’ or above.

The infrastructure service cluster has an identifiable preference towards the national level. National strategies can help facilitate large-scale activities around data storage solutions and standards. Data-related policies also tend to be most effectively applied at a national level, whilst policy diversity at a pan-European level becomes problematic. An exception in this category is holding and lending of specialist equipment, which would experience significant logistical barriers at wider geographical ranges. However, transnational access schemes run by pan-European networks enable sharing of infrastructure and facilities.

The data services cluster shows the strongest preference towards a pan-European model. As digital services, these can effectively be constructed around a distributed digital workplace. These services are also likely to benefit from economies of scale of a centralised model, which would also help to drive harmonisation of data standards, processes and platforms across the DiSSCo membership, and integration with core DiSSCo platforms like the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) being developed by the SYNTHESYS+ Project (Smith et al. 2019).