Author Archives for Natural Sciences Collections Association

NatSCA Digital Digest – October 2025

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Welcome to the October edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

GCG Winter Seminar in Hastings – Registration Open Now

While the call for abstracts has now closed, you can still register to join the Geological Collections Group in December at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery for their 2025 Winter Seminar and Annual General Meeting. The Seminar and AGM will be held at the Museum on December 10th and will be followed by a field trip to the coast in the Pett Level – Fairlight area on December 11th.

For registration forms and details about the talks of the day, guidance on what to expect during the field trip, and directions for finding your ways to all of the above, visit their website here.

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From Deck to Decant: A Marine Biologist’s Déjà Vu After a Year in a Natural History Museum

Written by Dr Jamie Maxwell, Collections Assistant, National Museum of Ireland, Natural History.

Not every job takes you to a windswept beach on Ireland’s west coast to recover the head of a stranded True’s beaked whale calf. But then again, my past year as a Collections Assistant at the Natural History Museum in Dublin has been anything but ordinary. As we collected the head of the slightly decomposed whale calf, I was reminded of my previous fieldwork experiences, mainly on research cruises during my academic career. Before joining the museum, I spent a decade in education and research as a marine biologist, specializing in deep-sea invertebrates. During that time, I not only investigated freshly collected specimens but also engaged with museum collections. It wasn’t until I became a collections assistant at the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History that I became fully immersed in the day-to-day workings of a museum. Much of the past year was taken up with decanting the contents of the Merrion Street building in preparation for renovation. In this blog, I’ll explore how decanting a museum is remarkably like being involved with a research cruise. 

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NatSCA Digital Digest – September 2025

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Welcome to the September edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

Call for Papers – GCG special issue of Geological Curator.

This is reminder of the upcoming GCG special issue of Geological Curator. This issue will be published in Spring 2026, titled ‘Moving towards equitable Geoscience Collections’.

The purpose of this issue is to consolidate current research and initiatives that aim to improve the environment, accessibility, and future of geological collections. Broad themes welcomed in this issue include anti-colonial practice, physical accessibility, neuroinclusive practice, and representation of minority groups. Submissions can include topics relating to museums broadly, but submissions with a Geoscience collections focus would be preferred.

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Seeing With Their Eyes A Poetic Reflection on the 2025 ‘From Collections to Connections’ NatSCA Conference Presentation

Written by Pauline Rutter – Independent Archival Artist, Community and Organisation Poet.

These words look out from the page with eyes I have borrowed. Eyes not shaped for vision through the specific disciplinary scientific lens. Eyes that strain to see beyond past centuries of debate on what, of all origins, is knowable and what is not. With these original eyes, would ways of seeing allow the light to travel outwards resisting funnelled perspectives and interpretations descended from imperialistic systems of Enlightenment science, colonial ideologies and narratives? In this context my eyes had opened up unevolved or re-evolved with lepidopteran vision, though not removed from all that had been taught to be seen. New eyes with sight of intensified colour that amplified nature’s interconnecting patterns, only visible outside the spectrum of the everyday, the expected, the predetermined. 

What use is butterfly sight that transforms configured objects and living matter with or without full binominal species names, into fragments like those of the intertwined and metamorphosed elements in ritualistic rapture spreading out across a Wangechi Mutu collage? 

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Crispy, Brown and Far Too Delicate – Are Herbarium Specimens Just Too Difficult to Use?

Written by Clare Brown, Leeds Museums and Galleries.

Taking a walk through a forest, running through fields of wheat or even just gazing at trees, all a far-cry from dealing with the sheets of pressed, long-dead dried plants you come across in museum collections. Good taxidermy at least looks like the original animal.

Other problems with plant specimens include their need for low light, extremely careful handling and, occasionally, mercuric chloride. Despite being phenomenally important to researchers, for everything from tracking climate change to curing cancer, plant collections are not at the top of many people’s lists when it comes to exhibitions, events and workshops.

So, what public-facing engagement can you do with herbarium specimens? Here I’ve looked at a few great case studies where creative collections are delivering brilliant botany… Continue reading →