Unlock Your Collection's Potential
Partner with El Toco for the HSDS Building AI Capability and Datasets Fund.
We provide AI development, data engineering, and front end design to turn your heritage archives into a cutting-edge resource.
Schedule a 15-minute scoping call
The Opportunity
HSDS Grant
The Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS) is offering grants of up to £50,000 (80% funded) to apply AI to UK heritage and archaeological datasets.
Technical Requirement
The HSDS can provide computing power, but applicants must provide their own AI developers and technical specialists.
Our Solution
As a UK-based AI search provider, El Toco acts as your technical co-applicant. You bring the domain expertise and collections, our team brings the experience building and deploying modern data platforms.
Ways we can help
Make legacy platforms AI-ready
Many institutions rely on older repositories like CKAN to store their collections. Using advanced multimodal indexing, we can convert your text and image records into a unified resource which is suitable for AI agents. This prepares your data for use in conversational search and by intelligent AI research assistants, without disrupting your existing setup.
Modern interfaces designed for discovery
Great collections deserve beautiful presentation. Many archive search tools are cluttered and difficult to use. We have invested heavily in developing modern visual interfaces, turning complex functionality into a few intuitive clicks. With this approach, we can make your archives inviting and easy to explore for everyone.
Automated data cleaning & standards compliance
Different file formats and passive file drops often leave records with missing or inconsistent data. We can build data pipelines which automatically clean messy records, eliminate bottlenecks, and align your data with international heritage standards like CIDOC CRM and Darwin Core.
We build for your needs
VRE & GPU ready. We can build solutions to run inside the HSDS Virtual Research Environment and leverage the STFC Hartree Centre GPU cluster if extra computing power is needed.
Open & reusable by design. Everything we deliver can be released as open-source software, allowing other museums and research projects across the heritage sector to adopt and reuse it.
Low ongoing maintenance. We engineer our solutions to be reliable and lightweight, ensuring your team is not left with heavy technical upkeep once the grant concludes.
Cost efficient infrastructure & cloud hosting. We integrate directly with your existing setup to avoid expensive hardware purchases, or deploy streamlined, budget-friendly cloud clusters on AWS if you prefer external hosting.
Project outline
El Toco is partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund, meaning we're experienced in managing grant-funded projects.By dividing the work into clear phases, we ensure the goals are met and the workload is manageable:
Proposal prep
Deadline 4 Dec 2026
Identify project scope, target datasets and achievable outcomes within the 4 month timeframe.
Prototype development
Jan 2027
We immediately create a working prototype using a restricted use-case to ensure the project deliverables are achieved up front.
Agile iterations
Jan - Feb 2027
We rapidly iterate on the prototype to build out its full functionality and handle edge cases.
Deployment & handover
Mar - Apr 2027
We deploy the working solution and ensure the knowledge is embedded to use it going forward.
Governance, funding & compliance
Our partnership will be arranged to give you peace of mind:
- Your institution retains all copyright and data ownership.
- Transparent funding. The HSDS grant covers 80% of project costs. We can structure the remaining 20% to use in-kind support and existing resources.
- We are a UK-based company. All of our work complies with HSDS funding requirements and we can travel to meet you on site.
Let's get started!
The grant deadline is Dec 4, 2026 so we are accepting proposals now. To start planning your project, please write to us at: