Holding the soil and environmental materials safely in the WOSSAC archive is only part of the overall aim and mission. A key theme of the archive and indeed a founding purpose of WOSSAC is to disseminate materials as widely as possible to relevant stakeholders and interested parties. This does of course have a cost associated with the task, but thanks to funding support, materials for two countries have recently been captured systematically; namely for both Sudan (sponsored by the UNEP) and Tanzania (sponsored by the EU). It is hoped that the collections of other territiories can follow suite.

Following the completion of a project sponsored by the UNEP, WOSSAC is pleased to have placed online digital materials comprising a systematic scanning of all holdings for Sudan. This extraordinary set of information is of tremendous importance as a support for governance in Sudan, and as a research resource. Materials provided set out the context of land evaluation in Sudan, since the first soil investigations in the 1930s. The material held for Sudan is comprehensive, beginning with early colonial mapping and including a number of national soil assessments undertaken in the 1950s. There are also comprehensive records from soil and land use investigations carried out by the Land Resources Division of the UK in the area of Tabora and a collection of further surveys at various scales. Finally the archive holds a comprehensive collection of reports and maps of surveys undertaken in the Nile Valley irrigated area, dating from the 1960s.

The scanning and digital capture of the material, comprising 1,578 maps and 687 reports, comprise in total some 100 Gb of data, highlighting the magnitude of the task undertaken.