4 November 2025

Environmental & Sustainability Framework Supplier

Deadline to apply is 02 December at noon.

Environmental & Sustainability Framework Supplier (Public Contracts Scotland Reference Number: NOV542641)

Towards a National Collection is tendering for a Cybersecurity Framework supplier for the N-RICH Prototype project, a two-year initiative delivered in collaboration between the Towards a National Collection programme and AHRC, funded by UKRI.

The N-RICH Prototype will deliver targeted early-stage activities to reduce future investment risks. It will test the key elements and examine the scope, costs, risks, impacts and benefits of a future digital research infrastructure for cultural heritage in the UK. Core activities will include a Digitisation Capability Pilot, a Prototype infrastructure, and three cross-cutting frameworks on environment & sustainability, ethics, and cybersecurity.

We seek a supplier to design and deliver an Environmental & Sustainability Framework to ensure that the digital-collections infrastructure developed through N-RICH can scale responsibly within environmental and financial limits. 

The supplier’s work will:

  • Establish a carbon and cost baseline for digitisation, storage, and compute across representative pilot institutions.
  • Prototype tiered storage and preservation models (hot/warm/cold) and quantify their environmental and financial trade-offs.
  • Define “good-enough” digitisation and preservation standards to avoid over-specification and duplication.
  • Create a carbon-transparency model that links service cost with emissions data.
  • Recommend benchmarks, governance levers, and reporting methods for sustainable digital infrastructure design.We seek a supplier to design and deliver a Cybersecurity Framework that defines how cultural-heritage data and systems participating in the N-RICH Prototype can be protected, monitored, and recovered in the event of a breach.

To access detailed information about this tender opportunity, please first register for free on the Public Contracts Scotland portal and then use the Open Tender link provided here