 We're going to be looking at some of the very complex issues that museums collections and archives face when trying to determine the most sustainable ways to preserve and make available their holdings. I was looking at the forthcoming Museums Association UK conference and I noticed that they had a number of of sessions around climate change. They have a sustainable procurement. They have climate change programming. They have transfer and reuse of collections and they have something called the power to act on climate, which has the wonderful subtitle why status quo should only be a rock band. So lots on sustainability. Interestingly, not so much coming through. I'm sure they will mention it and not so much going through specifically around sustainable sustainability and the digital. So fascinating subjects and one where we're really pleased to be joined by colleagues who have been working within this area. So first you'll be hearing from Kate Gill and Sarah Phillips who are from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Q and they're going to share their ambitious project to digitize entire collections of more than 8 million plant and fungal specimens. That will open up a treasure trove of information to help scientists understand and protect the natural world. And then later we'll be hearing from Stacy Anderson who's the media archivist at the box in Plymouth, who will share beyond analog, which is a journey towards sustainable digital preservation within museums and archive service. So wonderful to be joined by those by those colleagues. Without further ado, I am going to hand over to Kate and Sarah and I'm going to shut up for a little while and listen to their to their presentation. Yes, thank you for the invitations joining research libraries UK and Sarah and I are going to be talking for the next 20 minutes or so about what we're doing at the Royal Botanic Gardens Q. I'm actually at Wakehurst, which is down near Gatwick Airport and Sarah is joining you from Richmond London. Again, we're kind of living the virtual dream of actually going through this kind of presentation to remotely. And I'm going to do the first few slides which is kind of about the conversation that we're trying to the message we're trying to do about that sustainable conversation that goes to leading to as to why is this important why digitization such a critical conversation to have. And then I'm going to hand over to Sarah who's actually been living and breathing the nuts and bolts of this project for a number of years. So I won't steal her glory with any more intros than that. So one of the most common conversations we have with people is to why are you digitizing what's the point in digitizing. And so we kind of come up with a couple of slides as to five ways that digitizing anything, but particularly digitizing Q specimens can help save the world. And there's a lot of information and data that's kind of kept within the Q environment and I don't know how many of you have been to Royal Botanic Gardens Q. There's probably very few of you that have actually wandered around the Q science buildings that are hidden behind various hedges that most public don't go to. And even out of those people, there's probably even a smaller population who have actually wandered through our herbarium collections and opens and covers and had a look at what's inside. Now that means it's really, really hard to reach those people. So the people who actually come into our environment and actually physically touch our specimens are the hardcore research researchers who have gone through all those hoops and permits and put on their white gloves and gone through training to actually physically engage with our specimens. What we're trying to do very much with the digital conversation is reach to the next generation. It's to those people that are in key stage three key stage four undergrad postgrad to go right you're now very excited climate people. And what I want to do is give you some of the fundamental core conversations that you can have about specimens around the world. And at Q we've got over 200 years worth so it's really good for us to kind of start that conversation to give people the right language about how they can save the world going forward. So five things you can do with digital specimens you can combat climate change which is the obvious one that people kind of come to as to what's useful part about the kind of digital collections. We know there's great rising global temperatures and what we don't understand as well is that that link to the plants and fungi that we rely on around the world, both in terms of food and medicine, but also in terms of materials for buildings and infrastructure. If you look at the worldwide need for natural, natural elements, we actually have a huge amount of those in our herbarium and from Gary. And we've got things called the economic botany collections, which basically talks about things that have economic value over the last 200 years. And it's really interesting watching how that story has changed what was important and what is now important going forward. We still really don't know what's going to be important in the next 50 or 100 years. So it could be that some of the plants that we've currently got in herbarium could then be genome matched could then be receded then be Germanized, germinated sorry, and actually then grown into some of the future crops that we're actually going to be eating. Currently, our particular diet preferences are very, very commercialized. So we actually focus on a really few number of species, which kind of brings into the next one as to about 40% of the world's plants are now threatened with extinction. This is a huge jump from literally, you know, 456 years ago. And some of those plants are again what drives economic value for some of those communities. We have relied on timber relied on coffee, and now in a geographical location where they can't grow the crops they used to, and either they have to physically, you know, up move their family into different areas, or look at more sustainable crops for that particular environment at a slightly higher temperature more salinity, etc, etc. So understanding what plants did grow in certain areas, which we of course having again in our herbarium specimens. There's a very, very large catalog of these things were grown at this point in time and collected at this geolocation. So you can actually map how some of the crops have moved geographically because of the climate being changed, or the environment being changed or the geographical political barriers being changed. So things like that are actually really interesting to track as to where they were to hopefully then look forward to where we're going in the future. I mean the last one for those of you coffee drinkers amongst us 60% of the wild coffee species are now threatened with extinction. So just bear that in mind next time you go for your Costa tomorrow, which brings us into feeding. And again, the kind of food we choose we choose has been very commercialized over the years and the species that are now being driven are being driven because of productivity not because of actually sustainability wise. And just 15 crops account for 90% of the world's energy intake, which again is really quite frightening when you think about the options that we should have and around the world. If you go to some of the indigenous communities they don't rely on any of the crops we rely on because they're just not local to their area. And actually they've got more sustainable and immunity to certain areas certain diseases in that particular area. So if you go back to the Irish potato famine, you know, an areas like that, you actually got areas where they adapted and they now know what foods they can rely on for the 50 years that they've been around and hopefully for the next 50 years in the future. Drought and salinity and fire actually I could also have added to this conversation is a big issue for certain parts of the environment. Some areas of Australia have have got very resistant fire resistant plants, but unfortunately we now get to the point where actually the fires are actually raging in areas that are outside of that into areas that have got no fire resistance whatsoever. So we're losing quite large swathes of land, and some plants just never recovering from that. And if you think about again that plants in local areas do actually feed communities, we really need to think about what were how it survives, and then how we can actually sustain the people in those areas. And in that area, we have more than 7 million plant specimens 70,000 sorry 700,000 those are legumes. So again it's a really big area as to how do we make enough, enough food to food the world really coming back to one of those live aid quotes from many many years ago. So moving on to agriculture, this is one of the big commercial drivers and again there's also a point at which we have to appreciate that we have limited landmass. So with staples that we've got we have to extract the most amount of value out of the land we have available. And in some areas, particularly in serials the warming world is going to be kind of have a significant effect on our food security and the areas that can grow the food that sustains the world. We've kind of seen it with some of the geopolitical conversations with Ukraine in the last year or say, but actually that could be that could be that conversation can take place in so many other areas where certain staple diets are actually being threatened. So with the herbarium conversation again we have the raw material, literally, to actually talk about how wheat has evolved over the years, which varieties of species have have sustained in certain areas. And then also for those areas that have been destroyed by natural disaster how we can actually rewild those how we can actually get that those crops back into that environment, using either the content we've got the millennium seed bank, or some of our Hungarian areas. So we're very committed in terms of our network of contacts, in actually making sure that that the ethnic kind of environment for certain foods is actually sustained for as long as we possibly can, and then also feeding the population around it. And then finally one that I find really quite interesting could talk about medicines plants and funghi and this is the first slide that I actually talk about funghi, but funghi are not another part of the conversation that we're actually going through at Q where digitizing our herbarium, but also digitizing our fungarium. And a fungarium specimen is not flat, it's a 3D kind of environment. So actually, some of the techniques we're having to use for digitizing our fungarium are fundamentally different to some of the techniques that Sarah is going to be talking about in the herbarium. But the whole point is that we're actually trying to capture the useful information from the specimens that we have in our buildings, and again make them accessible to as many people as we possibly can. We're kind of agnostic about this, we're open to people having as much information as they possibly can. We share as much as we possibly can because we know there's people around the world who have some really intelligent questions and way more than we could probably come up with. And actually giving them some of that core data is really, really important to them being able to answer some of their really groundbreaking research questions that they're coming up with. And it's really gratifying to see that. And if we can mobilize the world's researchers around the world, based on Q data, that will be a great achievement for us. So within the fungarium, we're actually also exploring different tools to analyze a specimen as to how you actually engage with some of these specimens. What's important? Is it the physical image? Is it the image side of things? Is it some of the trait data that goes in it? Is it genomic data? Is it the X-ray? Is it for fungi? Is it the mycelium that's under the ground in a LIDAR scan? There's lots of different ways we can gather information about plants and fungi. And what we're trying to do is make sure we don't miss anything in our digitization conversation. So actually it's a really big, exciting experiment to be part of. And actually at the end of this, we're going to have a huge, enormous database that's open to the world to actually help all those researchers go on and come up with some fantastic questions in years to come. So this is kind of the digitization project that we're going through in a minute. We're about 15 months into it. It's a huge, large-scale digitization project. We're hoping to actually digitize 8.5 million items in four years. Like I say, we're about a year and a half into it. We've just got to the three million specimen points in the herbarium. So we are literally ripping through the building, covered by coverage, table by table, and capturing all these items into a huge, enormous database that we built in-house, which is our integrated collection management system. And then once we've got that populated with as much as we possibly can, we're then enabling the data portal. And our data portal is basically our doorway to the world, which is where we wish to engage with the world by communities of researchers. So that's the project that I lead. It's been a great journey so far. And now I'm going to hand over to Sarah. Hi, thanks, Kate. Yeah, so as Kate was saying, so it's a four-year project to digitize the herbarium and the fungarium. We think, but we don't know. Our estimate was where 7 million herbarium specimens and 1.25 million fungarium specimens. Because we don't have a catalogue. We don't really actually know how much we actually have until we do that. Yeah, so it was costed us 29.3 million. We have 10 million pounds funding from DEFRA, which was secured in April 2022. And then we're just negotiating further funding with them at the moment. It's just sort of how government funding happens, as you may know. So what we do here is obviously is to, as Kate said, there are quite a few streams. We've got the digitization. We've got a new collections management system. And so a lot of our systems are out of date. They were not fit for purpose. And then we'll be able to create links between our different collections. So you'll be able to link the seed collection that you took with the herbarium specimen voucher and make those links a lot easier than you could in the past. And then we've got a data portal that will be releasing all the data to, to freely available to everybody. Okay, so next slide. So the, we have, we had to put a business case to. Sorry Sarah. That's fine. So you had a business case to DEFRA. And so we have mainly we've discussed the main reasons to do this was obviously all the science addresses who want to facilitate all the strategic and novel scientific activities. I mean, we want to use people to use it in many novel different approaches and people should use it in any way they want to. And also, if Q doesn't do this, then we're starting to become obsolete. There is like an, we want people there is an expectation now that our collection is digital. And sometimes we have more and more people going, oh, you haven't got had it digitized. Why can't I have those records for my research. So we need to do it to become to make sure we become a global leader. The digitization will never replace the physical specimen. You can't get DNA from a, from an image. You can't look at its chemistry, but it would protect if anything did happen to the specimen. It would mean that some, at least some data was still available. And you also have more efficient tracking of the use of specimens with links to the permits that when it comes in, and you have, you can track access to genetic resources and benefit sharing and translation and Nagoya. And hopefully all this will make it also more efficient collection management system, although you will have the added also of the added digital curation that you still need to do alongside the physical curation later. Okay, next slide. So, I'm doing the business development took a lot of work and it shouldn't be as dress made it how long that took. So we, and we had to, you know, you have to make a strategic economic and commercial case. So we actually had a leader team of four, and which included Deffra economists to do the review. Again, putting we had all the benefits to do that that we're tracking quarterly. I mean, a lot of the benefits will only come after the data is online, but part of the benefits is like would be involved like upskilling our digital team that is also happening at the moment. So our team has started from actually a case of three. And now we're up to a team of about 60 people. So it's been very big to big recruitment. There's also been a big lesson and big upskilling of learning about digitization in the team. Okay, next slide. This was our benefits. So the other benefit will also be when we digitize we will hope that we'll be able to get further funding for other projects that we wouldn't be able to do without the digitization because the cost of digitization was prohibitive. Yeah, next slide. So, like I said, the whole process for that took three, three months to do the full going through the business case, but we've done a lot we've been doing digitization for a long time at Q and we've learned a lot. And now the technology was in the right place where we can do rapid digitization. We're doing a mixture of in house and external supplier. So the ex we to the tender for an external supplier, he was doing the majority of the digitization they're a company called Max communications, but we are doing the more complex material. So we're doing material where if you know normal specimen you might have one specimen on a sheet. But sometimes you have specimens where there are many, many specimens on a sheet. There's more the case with things like orchids, which is small and they just happen to be lots, usually lots on a specimen sheet, and also the finger and you have many packets on a sheet. So that involves a lot more noticing sort of skill to work at how many collections they are so we've got a mixture of an in house and an external team. We've got a collection of palms, which were which are bulky and in boxes, so that and they take a lot longer because you have to refocus in between. So that's also why we're doing those in house. Next slide. And so, so the risk, I guess, is that we haven't had funding funding post March, but we've got very strong indication that that Q is committed to doing this. And we're also approaching deffer for funding. But because we're not sure we want to try and where we have funding we're trying to increase and do as much digitalization as possible in this period. So we're trying to bring in a lot of the team to do this at the same time as doing business as usual in the herbarium. So finding space in the herbarium still allowing researchers to work and carry on that so not to disrupt their day to day activities is a challenge. It's been amazingly everyone is so committed to the project at Q outside of the project that everyone knows how important it is so everyone's been very accommodating and giving us logistics and resources that we need. Next slide. So where are we so we're now October 2023. As I said, we had a team of three before this project started occasional small digitization projects and now we're a team of 60. And we have completed. And almost two wealth we completed two wings of the five wings of herbarium. So we've completed the legumes we completed the composite which is a daisy family. And we've also completed our monocots which is our grasses our lilies and our sedges. So that's the imaging. So we can see these pictures of every time we use a finish a bit of the collection we have a like a little celebration to celebrate it. And the in house team of the Hungarian started a bit later we're taking images of the packets for transcription. We're not doing any we're not doing any of the fancy 3d imaging or like microscopic imaging or anything like that with a finger in the moment but we're building on that work. After the images are taken they've been uploaded and quality their quality assured we got big quality assurance team they're uploaded into our digital and asset management system. We had to upgrade that system because of the work and the whole infrastructure so we had over 1.5 petabytes of dedicated storage and our dam is capable of ingesting over 15,000 images a day into our system. So it's getting that correct. And so yeah did our dam now holds over actually it's near 2.5 million herbarium specimens, and the images are sent to actually through our supplier max through a team in India, and that and where our team quality assured it, but the now just last week the first transcription data have been started being uploaded into our ICMS system into a collection management system so is available to our staff and researchers, and soon it will be available externally. So we kind of just finished the complete cycle of that work which is quite exciting, but we still got to up that and make sure we get the flow correct. But it's been a huge journey. And we're still we're almost there, but it feels like we're in full flow now. That's been great. Okay, next slide. So, you know, as you can see the real world impact of our collections is fast, and we want to get the data out as quickly as possible. We're doing an ambitious project in a short amount of time with a big team with a lot of staff. And, and we're working through those challenges, but I think it's been very sort of successful and we're really excited at the next stage and getting it all out. So, yeah, thanks for listening. I think we'll take any of your questions. Thank you very much Sarah and thank you Kate for that we're going to take questions after our next speaker. So, so, so you can have a little breather and listen to Stacy for a while thank you to those of you who are, who are popping questions into the chat we're getting a list of those together so that's going to be great. We're going to see things that I know are going to spark some really great discussions, but for the next time being we're going to hand over to Stacy Anderson who's media archivist at the box in Plymouth. Let's talk about beyond analog which is their journey towards sustainable digital preservation within a museum and archives service over to you, Stacy. So hello everyone thank you to the RL UK for inviting me along as one of the speakers today and I come to you today from our media workroom at the box, which is where our digital decarbonisation in practice happens so it's very apt that I'm presenting from this space today. Now, digital decarbonation is a huge topic and it's certainly not something that we can cover in 20 minutes so for the purposes of this webinar. I just want to touch on a small percentage of the baseline thinking which has informed our practice. Now, it's not something that we're doing an isolation either. And throughout the presentation, I will be evidencing some of the ways in which the wider sector is responding to this agenda throughout this presentation. So just to quickly move forward, and I just want to start with looking at some of the challenges, what the challenge is, and why we need to be talking about digital decarbonisation and there's some examples like on the screen there for you. Digital has often been seen as a solution for mitigating the heavy carbon footprint for caring for our physical collections, but digital also carries a carbon cost and that can be quite significant depending on the size of your collection and the scope of your organisation. And furthermore, the collective impact of countless digital archives, data centres and online services adds weight to that impact. Now, I don't want to scare anyone with some pretty heavy statistics, but they can be quite alarming when we start to look into it. And between 2.5 and 3.7% of global commissions, emissions are generated from data centres compared to the aviation industry at about 2.1 to 2.4%. And furthermore, an estimated 65% of data is considered to be dark data and what we mean by that is that it's used once or never at all. And another 15% is redundant data, so it's out of date and it has little or no value. And there is also the challenge which I'm sure affects all of us around duplicated content. Now, often the figures that are attached to this can be quite alarming and that's led to a bit of a reluctance to collect or even consider collecting digital assets. But the danger there is that we risk compromising the access pathways into our collections that many of our audiences rely on, which is often achieved through digital technology and systems and the act of digitisation itself. So it's a really tricky challenge in the sense that we live in an increasingly digital age collections benefit enormously from digitisation and digital preservation. Digital helps us and our users to to reflect on pertinent narratives of the day and also to reveal hidden narratives and diverse representation within our collections. So how can this challenge be confronted? How can we ensure that continued creative audience engagement and collections care through our digital projects whilst also being mindful of the realities of climate change? So I now want to spend a little bit of time looking at what the sector, what the wider sector is doing about this challenge. Now, the fact is the climate change agenda is not going to go away. And it's actually been on the radar for for many, many years, many decades, albeit perhaps not as strongly as it is today, as you can see by some of the thinking some of the articles that appear on the screen here. What's also driving this is that increase in digital consumption and increasing expectation to be digital. And Sarah, I think you mentioned that in your presentation just a moment ago. But another driver is of course the rates of digitisation, particularly for at risk collections and to build resources that then feed into programming schemes. And of course, our own understanding of the climate change and global warming, which has brought much more of an awareness of the impact of the work that we do and how that can contribute to climate change. Now the sector is getting on board with this a lot of work is being done to support decarbonisation. And that's coming through the developments of tool kits, carbon calculators and research into green technologies, which essentially are providing us with a baseline of information to them review our digital practice and inform future practice. Academics from Loughborough University are doing brilliant work to lead on this agenda, and they've actually launched a data carbon school card, which I've provided a link at the bottom there for organizations to measure and forecast the co2 relating to any digital project. There are also conversations within the archives, within the archives and records association, particularly within the environmental sustainability group of which I belong, and also the archives and technology section. And above all, the sector is working really hard to advocate a positive opportunities focused digital preservation approach, which reduces those anxieties around collecting and storing digital content, whilst also acknowledging the impact of what we do and encouraging us to to undertake work that safeguards the planet. So I now want to come on to the practice that we are rolling out here at the box. Now, we briefly looked at the challenges and some of the driving forces, but actually stepping into this agenda can be quite hard work. Now, the following slide does reflect the practice that I'm involved with at the box. We certainly don't hold all of the answers. We are certainly on a journey and we haven't overcome this challenge, but we are keen to share our practice with others. Now what's driving us in our work is very much wrapped around funded projects we've got funding at the moment from the British Film Institute, which is called the reimagining the film archive program. So there are kpi specifically attached to digital decarbonization. As an MPO, we are also working towards supporting the Arts Council's investment principles around environmental responsibility. And this work more broadly reflects our own mission, vision and values to be progressive and relevant and to address pressing issues of the day. I'm certainly not doing this work in isolation on my own, and I do have a team of digital preservationists, I'm going to call them but they are media technicians who are contracted to the media archive collection specifically, and are supporting our digital decarbonization devils. And one of them is this chap that you see on the screen here. His name is James and he's one of our media technicians and he's particularly passionate about climate change and and digital digital refinement. So, given the volume and specialist nature of our collections, we recognize that to achieve carbon zero within our approach to collections care will not happen overnight, but we're currently doing what we can. And our aim with this work is to build improvements and efficiencies into our workflows and technology to reduce the carbon footprint of undertaking that work. So with regards to digital preservation, we're aiming to achieve the highest possible standards of best practice for digital preservation with the resources we have, but this has a carbon cost, and that increases the more we digitized. So we take measures to ensure that we aren't digitizing material just for the sake of it. We're working to the principles of preventing pointless preservation. And in consultation with our depositors and digital creators and wider staff, we're choosing to prioritize and digitally preserve the most important and frequently used and at risk parts of our collection. In terms of digitization, part of that process traditionally has involved making three different quality copies levels for each file, a preservation and access and a viewing copy. But we're actually now only opting to make the highest and lowest quality versions, which significantly reduces our storage space requirements, saves on resources, energy and money. And access copies are only generated and created and generated when they're needed rather than as a general ingest concept. And furthermore, we like many of the other film archives that we work with, including the British Film Institute. We're using a lossless compression format for our moving image collections content called FFV1. And typically those files are about one third the size of the uncompressed files, which means that they take up less storage on our digital systems, saves on resources and doesn't use as much energy. But crucially, there's no loss in quality, so it seems like a win-win situation. So moving on to digital storage, the question of digital storage is by far one of the most challenging aspects for any organization that is undertaking digital work, digital preservation. Our master preservation files, which represents the majority of our digital content, around 200 terabytes are stored on LTO tapes, and they only actively consume energy whilst being read or written to. So they represent a huge energy saving over traditional spinning disks. The slight downside to that is that there is a very small delay in terms of when those files are accessed, but it's only by a few minutes or so. So that's a compromise that we're willing to take. In terms of monitoring, so monitoring our ingested files. Regular checking, regularly checking the integrity of digital files is really important to ensure against bit rot, to ensure against decay and also corruption, but it does use energy. So we've opted to balance the frequency of those checks and the need to reduce energy consumption with the need to meet best practice. So integrity checks are undertaken occasionally and they're run at off peak times during the day. So in terms of advocacy, more broadly advocacy is one of the most important things that we are doing around digital decarbonization. We've actually created a green group within the box, which has members from across the service that sit within that. And we're vigorously encouraging a green sustainable approach to service wide activity, which very much looks in at our digital journey. There is a lot more that we need to do. We are just rolling out a carbon literacy scheme for all members of staff to achieve that understanding that knowledge around why we are focusing in on this. We are also looking to review our collections and development plans for acquisitions, particularly around digital acquisitions to ensure that we're not binding ourselves to any unsustainable practice in the future. And we're also looking more broadly not only out the way that we store and manage our digital assets, but also our physical collections as well. But I think it's really important to point out here that none of what I've talked about compromises our ability to meet professional digital preservation standards. And in fact, there is a growing shift within the archive sector to review those standards against the values of decarbonization within the climate change agenda. So moving on now and I need to say that I've just touched on some of the practices that we're involved in around looking at our digital preservation activity here at the box. There's so much more that we are doing and I'd be very happy to share further information about that. But for now, I would like to share some of the pointers, some of the lessons that have come through the work that we have undertaken so far. Now, I appreciate that this might be overwhelming for a lot of people the thought of shifting practice can be terrifying. And strategically, it can be a big mountain to climb and that's certainly a perspective that we are hearing through the our environmental sustainability group. But there are very small practical steps that we can all take to support this agenda to achieve wins for the planet, but also for our own organization, but more broadly to serve as a leverage for when we have those strategic conversations. So here are some of those recommendations. So around selection and acquisition of collections. Do you need to keep everything do you need to digitize everything and does everything need to be out super high quality do you need multiple copies of a digital object that's certainly something that we've reflected in on our practice and you can make some quite significant savings if you reflect in on that and make the necessary adaptions. So in terms of management of digital assets, we've certainly reimagined how we preserve. Does everything need to be checks and does everything need to be monitored and can those processes be automated and set to run off peak hours. Do you using the most efficient storage mechanisms, and do you actually know the energy use values of your systems and infrastructures and as I as I mentioned before there are a lot of emerging tool kits and calculators that can help a service monitor and measure its carbon output. In terms of meaningful evaluation, this has been really important for us for measuring and evaluating what we're doing. And also the carbon cost of undertaking the work that we do around digitization is evaluation is not just about meeting KPIs, but it can be a point of continued reflection and responsible refinement of any future digital ambition. And of course there be visible advocate share and learn from others we are all much we're part of a much wider information ecology. So sharing best practice around how we digitize and how decarbonize our practice is incredibly valuable in inspiring that broader climate action. It can also help to drive innovation in the development of greener technologies to support the sector in that. So, you know, perhaps think about setting up a green group for your organization, and something that we've done here which very much fits into the advocacy agenda is embedding environmental responsibility within our exhibitions program. And the image that I've used on the screen there is an example of one of the works that will feature in our exhibition next year, Planet Ocean at the box which will seek to inspire visitors to imagine new futures and also serve as a call to action as well around climate change. So just to finish off then, whilst decarbonizing digital practice within our organizations alone may not single handedly solve the climate crisis, it is much much more part of a larger movement to reduce carbon emissions and to promote sustainability within the digital realm, which is increasingly vital in our interconnected and data driven world. Strategically speaking, building sustainable digital archiving practice can result in more efficient use of resources, which can save money, build wider organizational resilience, as well as help support the planet. And for those reasons alone, I think it's an entirely good thing. And I hope that you agree with me on that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Stacey. That's absolutely fascinating. And sorry you had some trouble with your slides. We haven't got a lot of time for questions, so let's get straight into it and bring back in Sarah and Kate as well. I'm going to summarize some of the things that are in the chat. We're now going to enable mics and cameras as well. So if you want to, for everybody, so if you want to ask a question live then pop your hand up. I've got a couple of kind of themes coming through in the questions that are in the chat. One is a bit about file formats, and particularly about, you know, we've heard the word petabytes here and you know we know that that's the data storage is the issue, one of the big issues that we're needing to deal with. You mentioned LiDAR, microscopic imaging, I think Kate or Sarah, I can't remember which one of you mentioned it. So there is a question about what file formats you use for preservation and quality and the extent to which you take into account data storage size within the project. So, I mean, is that something that's very much a factor? I'll first crack that one then hand to Sarah. So yes, it is very much so. So yes, LiDAR and some of the spatial imaging we do, clearly of trees and things like that. We're now in a situation where we've got the technology that we can do a complete scan of the entire tree. And that's actually quite a huge amount of data as you probably expect. Kind of similar to what Stacey was talking about. At the minute we are still in the situation of we're going to capture anything just in case it's important. We haven't kind of got to that filtering point yet, but having said that in terms of the petabytes and terabytes conversation, we are more than conscious of the amount of data farming and data storage and wild heat that we are using in doing that. So we're kind of engaged with a number of supply chains providers down around the world who, for example, one of our data server farms is actually going to be under the swimming pool for the Paris Olympics because actually they can use the heat to power the swimming pool. So we are trying to do that kind of circular conversation with some of our suppliers be tries and efficient as we can. I mean, and coming down to the file storage, to be honest, we take it in any format is part of the, the joy of the internet collection management system is with delivery set it up to ingest any data in any format because our research is worldwide, regardless of what we said, the best practice will will collect data, whichever is most appropriate to them. And we have to respect that. So actually, we don't actually impose too many file formats on anybody. We basically say just make sure you collect it and make sure you castle get appropriately and then we'll hopefully do something useful with it. Sarah, do you want to add anything to that. And so obviously with the digitalization project, we're trying to get we're used to we use a tiff format, we do have some compression, we're trying to use it so the high enough resolution image that you taxonomous can look at details and microscopic is as are you looking at hand lens is not the same as microscopic you could go higher but we're, we're, we didn't want to do to lower resolution so we've been trying to get that balance between storage size and what resolution we have. So in the earlier people asked about scanning we had slow slant scanning equipment, whereas now cameras and technologies have gone on and it's much easier to do those so 600 dpi images in that in that standard. So we have to stand try to standardize our actual herbarium image formats. And yeah, for that, that reason, and we have like surrogate images are created automatically, but again, we'll probably have to look at how much what sizes that we really need and try and reduce that. Thank you, Sarah. There's a question that's just come in the same that Stacey but actually picks up on something that you mentioned just now, Kate, which is about tech companies and it says do you do you find, Stacey there are good amount of tech companies that came to the table with green options for storage and collection growth options or did they just propose continual increasing in it already so but Kate you also mentioned didn't you about I don't know who wants to take it but Kate you also mentioned about about talking to the tech companies. It's been quite a journey. That's that's the diplomatic response there. And it's actually been an opportunity to through sharing practice as well because a lot of the tech companies that we deal with, you know, a source of they service lots of different organizations, working with us as a specialist sort of repository was was quite a new thing for them. So I think the first thing is that, you know, whenever we procure services or suppliers or even, you know, systems and devices. We always look at whether they carry green credentials because that's often a really good indication that, you know, you can have that constructive conversation. But with our tech company in particular, they actually looked to us to help co design the system that we ultimately ended up with so if you find a tech company that is open to working with you. They didn't know anything about the NDS say levels of digital preservation, we had to kind of, you know, inform that process and the result was that we ended up with a system that works for us and meets our, you know, sort of objectives around being sustainable. Of course, they're going to try and sell you, you know, a scalable solution that you can, you know, increase when needed. But I think decisions that we make around what we capture how we capture it is sort of keeping keeping that that at bay as it were, because we're reducing our file sizes that that kind of mitigates the need to then, you know, get get further, further storage. And one thing I would say is, you know, again, the importance of monitoring and review just because you have a system in place, you know, doesn't mean that that you shouldn't be open to actually changing that system. And I'm reviewing it and those calculators and toolkits which, you know, sort of empower you really to get a sense of your carbon footprint that enables you to have that that sort of leverage to then make those changes to your systems and work with other tech companies that hold those green credentials. Sorry, that's probably a really long winded way of responding to that. Really, really, really interesting. Kate, did you did you have anything to add on that? Yeah, so the thing that we again, I think we're we, along with other organizations are a lot more aware of the supply chain conversation and the carbon responsibility for the supply chain and some of the requirements we put on our companies and then what they have to then do to service it. Again, much like Stacy said, a lot of it's about communication education, and then also working with those companies who kind of get it. And we've been, you know, as part of most of the community, how kind of there's a greenwashing conversation as to let's just let's don't plant a plantation in the middle of nowhere. We're all good. We don't really kind of abide by that. We're very much digging into what are actually your green credentials and how you're going to do it. And more important than that, look at the the waste products conversations because I think if you can find a tech company who's got a good waste disposal policy, you tend to find that actually got quite good green credentials. So you kind of work backwards with some of the things you need to work and again working with those companies to be as efficient as they possibly can. But that's very interesting. I'm looking at those proxy kind of markers for that. Before I move on to talk about metadata, I just wanted to pick up on something that you'd said, Stacey, about the strategic problem. The problem about having those strategic conversations and getting a shift in terms of perhaps higher levels of management in terms of thinking about the change and how the institution is resistant to change. And I just wondered whether whether we felt that the there's a very strong overlap and perhaps even I'm wondering even a total overlap between carbon cost and actual financial cost in terms of the kind of the kind of petabyte problem. I mean, is that something you found or does it get much more complex than that? No, it's a really good, really good question actually and an insight. And yeah, I think there is definitely a synergy between particularly when you are talking to sort of senior management who don't necessarily, you know, want to understand the granular details, the technical details of what it is you are doing and the impact that it has on storage size, etc. But I think, you know, getting into the habit of actually instead of talking about the size of our collections in terms of petabytes or, you know, sort of, you know, Ziggabytes is a new one on me. That's one that I heard the other day. That's, you know, even greater. But actually getting into the habit of talking about it in terms of ton of CO2 emissions, because that then leads to conversations around, you know, sort of cost savings, resource savings, building efficiencies into the work you do is something that we do use quite a bit when we're having those conversations to get investment and funding. So I think it's kind of broadly knowing the audience that you're dealing with and making sure that, you know, what you're sort of what you're advocating for is something that they are going to resonate with in order to achieve the ultimate goal of what you want to do. Great. Thank you. I want to, before we close, I do want to make sure we talk about metadata and particularly is a great question about to queue really about whether you're incorporating linked data into the specimen digital record. And this for me just picks up on those things you were saying as well Stacy about about the kind of dark and redundant data and the idea that, you know, what is this a single source of truth kind of approach is that you know presumably that's even if you're not saving the the storage and the, and the, the, the carbon energy making the carbon carbon saving as well. Because you may be someone else's if we're not duplicating. I just want to take say something about link data and, and those kinds of things. Kate, did you want to come in on that link data a big part of what you're trying to do. It is actually I was just kind of applying in the text as well as some of the comments because I was trying to do that at the same time. And so yes, it is no not at all. Now, one of the big challenges you guys what's important and what's not important and you just don't know. So we're kind of, at this point in time we're capturing everything we possibly can and appropriate fidelity because what we, what we've taken the view that the specimen in front of us is the authentic specimen. And that was corrected, collected by that person at that point in time, etc. So we're trying to not only look at the specimen the transcription label the geolocation, and we're also trying to link that to field notes, plus also anything else we have to know. And at Q particularly we're just beginning now we've got our collection management system we're going to see some of the links to some of the living collections. And some of the other collections we've got that we didn't actually appreciate that we held the seed we also have something planted. And then we've got a field set of notes in the library we just didn't know that because we hadn't realized all these kind of things were linked up. So yes, we are committed to linking up as much as we possibly can. And then also obviously supplementing that with any future, you know, DNA coding LiDAR etc etc geolocation conversations and just adding that to everything. So on the picture you saw on what a series like there's a barcode. That barcode is a single point of truth for everything. So everything gets linked to that specimen by a barcode. So we're trying to kind of build those webs of all the information sets that we've got.