We hope you have enjoyed celebrating One Year of RICHeS with us!
Throughout October, we have reflected on a remarkable year of growth, collaboration and innovation across the UK heritage science community. Together, we celebrated the establishment of the RICHeS IHQ at our award-winning office, our role as the UK National Node of E-RIHS and our expanding network through regional workshops and community building activities, all while progressing the evaluation of the programme.
New opportunities and launches
October also marked the launch of several exciting initiatives that continue to invite your participation. We began the month highlighting the work of the Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS), celebrating their new catalogue launches. Applications for the HSDS Small Grants Programme remain open until 28 November 2025.
In addition, we announced the RICHeS Access Fund designed to further open up our distributed infrastructure to researchers across the sector. Expressions of Interest for this first call are open until 10 December 2025.
Showcasing early impact
In the latter half of the month, we turned the spotlight on the 31 Tranche 1 investments within the RICHeS programme. These investments are already driving significant progress from procuring state-of-the-art equipment to expanding or creating new spaces, decanting and recanting collections, the teams have been leveraging support, building collaborations and offering workshops, training and new roles.
Our recent blogs have highlighted early outcomes and lessons from these activities, including examples of how RICHeS is already shaping policy, demonstrating the value of sustained investment and inspiring innovative approaches to heritage science and conservation.
Moving forward together
Our first year of RICHeS has focused on building capabilities and connections, to ensure that the heritage science sector has the capacity to meet user demand and to make these investments findable and accessible.
The enhanced funded facilities and collections are scheduled to go live across 2026, with projects from the first Access Fund Call taking place from April 2026. If you have a research project that collaboration with the RICHeS distributed infrastructure would enhance, please do consider submitting an Expression of Interest for this first call.
Looking forward, we are excited to celebrate supporting researchers across the heritage science community and the innovations and impacts that emerge from this work across RICHeS. We hope you continue to follow along on our website and LinkedIn and encourage to get involved with RICHeS events and opportunities as we continue to build an informed, collaborative and innovative UK heritage science community.
If you have any questions, please contact the RICHeS IHQ team.