May the force of nature be with you! Welcome to another Digital Digest, everybody. It seems people really took home the message of last year’s conference and so the social media enthusiasm for this year’s NatSCA conference was immense – thank you to everybody who tweeted, shared, pinned, and otherwise spread the message of Noticing Nature.

#NatSCA2016

The conference also fell on a designated digest day, so rather than halve our resources to deliver a digest to an already overwhelmed readership, we thought we’d bring you a bumper installment this month instead. Vicky Purewal has recently touched upon the topic of our conference. Write-ups from our bursary recipients will be posted here, and talk write-ups will be published in Notes & Comments and in the next issue of the Journal of Natural Science Collections, due out at the end of this year.

Next year’s NatSCA conference will be held in Cambridge, so start planning your accommodation now, folks! You don’t want to miss this one.

News

Next, I’d like to congratulate both of my fellow NatSCA bloggers on their recent news:

Rachel Jennings, congratulations on joining the committee as our newest Editor. Rachel will be taking on the task of crafting our yearly journal into a thing of beauty. You’ve all seen what she’s done with our Facebook page and this blog, so I’m sure you’ll all agree that she’ll do a terrific job of this too.

Emma-Louise Nicholls, congratulations on becoming the Deputy Keeper at the Horniman Museum. Those of you who have been around a while will know that the former occupant of this position was our very own Paolo Viscardi.

Gina Allnatt has just started at Doncaster Museum this week as their new Natural History Curatorial Assistant, and we’re all really looking forward to learning more about this charming museum.

Events

NatSCA will be holding a seminar on Natural Science Collections and the Law on 15th June 2016 at the University of Bristol. Booking is open now! See here for details: http://natsca.org/event/2256.

Next month on the 1st of June, PubSci will be hearing from guest speaker Katrina Van Grouw on the marriage between art and the life sciences. Katrina is author of the Unfeathered Bird and has an exciting new book in the pipeline. She may even show us some sneak previews if we’re lucky. Do come along if you can, it’s going to be great.

And Finally

Finally, a belated happy 90th birthday to David Attenborough, who first graced our screens in 1952 and is still going to this day! I’m sure I speak for us all when I say that his natural history documentaries have been an inspiration and a delight.