 Hi, I am Mary T. Hin and I work with the Discovery Programme in Dublin and I'm here to talk to you, hopefully pique your interest on new research infrastructure that the Discovery Programme is part of. A lot of questions that have been asked today are relevant to this so I hope you find that too. So firstly, what is heritage science? Because we are all familiar with archaeological science, conservation science really it's a formalised discipline since 2006 and it reaches to cultural heritage and natural heritage and as you will see there, there are plenty of overlapping disciplines and as you've spoken of today, you have many examples of where archaeology overlaps with various disciplines. Some may seem strange, I know somebody asked me about linguistics but I know biologists have studied muscles as to how languages evolve but that's beside the point. Really I just should say before I go on to the next slide that archaeology and heritage science is thought to, hopes to engage various disciplines across the ICT areas, sciences and cultural and natural heritage. So the main challenges for heritage science are seen as finite cycles of funding and that is not exclusive to archaeology so you may all have been involved or are involved with projects which are going to come to an end and if you're lucky they will extend but ultimately they may not and you will have to work to preserve your outputs. You have these excellent research outputs, where do they go, who sees them, how are they used. So you have come to fragmentation and longevity of research outputs and databases of course. And then there are more theoretical questions like biased and experimental science with heritage. So biased means that there is a theory that you come with an object for analysis or you ask for a site to be analysed but you are coming with a significance. You're coming with a history to this. So you are asking it to be, for it to be analysed yet it has a context and a story which is determined by culture. And then you have the experimental aspect because usually you get one chance at analysing a deer bone or a mesolithic site. Geneticist and Trinity worked the last few years with the Discovery Program on one of our earliest mesolithic sites in Ireland and they had just one chance to analyse a cow bone, a giant red deer bone and a bear bone that are of which are now extinct. So you have to be also careful in that domain. And that's a question that needs to be, you need to chat to the science, you need to have a proper discussion with the scientists about that and how to approach it. Then of course there are the logistics like access to and travel to instrumentation to analyse these things, to use scientific equipment. And then there are simple issues like equipment, that's calibration, not collaboration. Skilled technicians, I have talked to scientists who say they have technicians but don't understand the object that we ask to be analysed. They may have to recalibrate a machine and they don't have the skills to do that. And they need to be upskilled and that is an issue. And also just differing operating systems. You can imagine two disciplines talking to each other, how do you standardise that? How do you talk to each other? So you can both benefit from the outcomes. Data availability, much of which has been discussed. Lack of a formalised space to access mutually beneficial methods and data for sciences and humanities. And this is what leads us to this new infrastructure. So just a little context. Very great projects out there like Iperian CH and Ariadne, which you may be familiar with. There are examples of projects that had a funding cycle and it came to an end. Well, Iperian CH is not at an end. But Ariadne did great work with examining the digital archaeology, asking questions of the digital from an archaeological point of view. And Iperian has some great models that it created in various labs. So they got their heads together and looked at what we do longer. So there's a model out there called an ERIC, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium. Many of you may be aware of it. And they said, right, we look at this model and other ERICs, and we come up with ERICs. Put it in to see what happens. And it was designated a proposed, and think of that word, proposed ERIC in 2016 by Esfri. And they're the body who oversee ERICs and whether they come to something or not. So ERIC is the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science. It will be a distributed research infrastructure for interpretation, preservation, documentation and management. That is a huge scope. So we have a lot to do. So it will be located in Florence and it will have distributed national hubs. That's how it will operate. It will be an open laboratory consortium and it's going to be created based on what exists and pull it all together, rather than create something new. You have to take into account as well that heritage is generally not a political priority and funding does push towards us. So it will become a portal for users to access research facilities that are outside your geographical location and even your specialism. So it's to work on the gaps on both sides and bring them together. So there are currently about 20 active participant states in the EU and that fluctuates a little, but there are seven observer countries. Member states are actively participant. Observer countries are looking on and say, right, we like what that's. We didn't have to do any hard work, but I like it. So I'll absorb it into my national infrastructure later down the line. About 100 organisations are involved across those countries helping, but it's like Ikram as well. So the timeline. So since 2016, on an EU level, I have another colleague here from ADS or York who's also working on ours, but everyone is working on 11 work packages and you contribute in some form to each. And then on a national level, I'm trying to establish national hub. Some national hubs exist. There are about seven across the EU, two are being established. Places like Italy, Portugal, Greece, Poland, and then the Czech Republic and Hungary are just currently trying to set one up. So in 2018, after contributing to the EU, overall overarching EU proprietary project, I hope to establish a national hub in the European Year of Cultural Heritage. And so far, we've had a lot of enthusiasm from both the sciences and humanities and indications of support from government, which is really what we need. So in 2019, the current member states will hand over a business plan. So that's what we're working on, the logistics of it. A bit boring, but the outcome will be good. So in 2020, it's hoped that the ERIC status will be designated, all going well. And then work will continue to have it fully operational in 2022. So that's the aspiration. And then you will all have access to long-term research infrastructure. You can all become users or you can become service providers. So just a general idea of what it looked like. The executive will be in Italy, fed by a general assembly. National coordinators will be the reaching point for national hubs. And these are what is the core of it all, labs. So the four labs are MoLab, FixLab, ArcLab and Digilab. So three of those exist already. MoLab, FixLab, ArcLab are either in some or all of the seven national hubs I told you about. A lot of art conservation people would be very familiar with MoLab. Some of you will be already. FixLab, I will go through all these. I'll just explain what they all have to adhere to. So there will be a criteria of excellence for service providers. As a user, you will have an access policy to guide you. So the information you create from this is yours. Is this FixLab? So that will all be sorted out. They'll all have to adhere to the fair principles, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. It will be on an open access principle. And data management plans will have to be in place. And national policy will supersede you when it comes to the management of the labs. And as I said, there are some existing already, but when I talk about creating a national hub in Ireland, which is our two, you may have some, one, some or all of the labs, but you don't have to have all of the labs. So MoBILab, this is in situ diagnostics. So someone will bring the equipment to you. And it's very non-invasive, no sampling, no contact. Hand-held equipment really, whatever can be transported. So just a familiar example, maybe you're probably all familiar with the book of Kells in Ireland. So Trinity College Dublin, they got that analysed with hand-held equipment and they accessed the UK MoBILab because none exists in Ireland. So the UK MoBILab came over, analysed the material and found various, made various comments on the parchment and pigment and found an extremely rare purple pigment. And they now want to do more investigations with MoBILab. So FIXAB is kind of, it's the same principle but you bring the object to them. And it's large and medium scale equipment. It's the synchotron. It's the slay facility in Paris. It's anything you can think of, iron beam analysis. And just an example is in Portugal, I come from a building's archaeological background so you'll see a bit of bias maybe, but these are the Porto and Evora cathedrals in Portugal. And Portugal has a bit of a building's conservation crisis and they're working their best. And in fact, they're like Phoenix out of the ashes because they're using things like FIXAB to address conservation issues and finding innovative solutions to things like granite deterioration. And that's from using FIXAB in the Iberian Peninsula. ARCLAB essentially access to scientific archives. And I'm using the Stuttgart's recent Rackofino project in 2017. They simply, during under the project, accessed ARCLAB to get British Museum expert reports and they were digitised as well. And that progressed their investigations into, I think it was a zinc and glass-placed degradation of inorganic material. But Digilab, this is the one I want you to listen to really. This is a new thing for Eris and lots of work has been done from a digital technology aspect with archaeology as you all can attest to. But the concept here is to provide a centralised platform. And it has yet to be worked out. You can see we're at the beginning of the beginning. The concept is to provide virtual access to scientific data, use of digital analytic methods and tools to promote interoperability. And that's really important. And management of heritage science databases. And you can see what disciplines feed into that. So it's mutually beneficial for all. But how it works has yet to be worked out. And I would welcome your thoughts on that in any way. And just finally, initial findings in Ireland have shown that 80% agree it's good. Heritage science and Eris will be good for current and future research. But collaboration issues show that there is an over focus on personal agendas between the sciences and humanities from experience. And other things like operating systems are an issue. So access to facilities, 77% support increased access. But the majority of their equipment that they have in houses small scale or equipment they have access to is external, 50% were not planning on buying any new equipment. So it shows the capacity is hugely restricted, even though the will is there. And data, I find this particularly interesting because 89% use open access to share research outputs. Only 18% adhere to fair data principles. Relatively new, I wouldn't find that too maybe concerning, but still it's a big indicator. And 58% have no data management plans in place, which is a huge number, a huge cause for concern. And then I left the funding that the old chestnut to last and I put it, well, someone found this funny, the pain in the neck. So, but 70% have difficulties accessing funding to, sorry, to get access, funding for access, funding for travel, equipment maintenance against skilled technicians and your own organizational funding to actually access large scale funding is an inhibition and that's a real problem. But the potential for archeology is huge and this is not a finite list by any means, but it will expand the scope for archeological investigations, open access to instrumentation and facilities and expertise. It will enable transferable skills. We can all upskill. It can offer standardization and that's another big one from today's discussion. It will strengthen theoretical archeological findings and merge it with evidence base when sometimes it isn't, that isn't always the case, but it can expand your context. It will support the long term conservation of archeology through non-intrusive investigation and promotion of that. And it will also increase the case for national digital supports. I know that's certainly a concern in Ireland and I don't think it's probably unique to Ireland either. So thank you. Thank you.