Category Archives for Conference

NatSCA Digital Digest

natscaYour weekly round-up of news and events happening in the world of natural sciences

Events

12th-14th October: Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities: Exploring new digital destinations for heritage and academia at The Imperial War Museum North, Manchester. Free conference exploring the use of digital, in museums environments.

22nd July: Digital vs. Analogue at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. One day conference looking at four themes: Tactile Engagement, Story Telling, Families and Schools, and Digital Displays.

8th September: Osteology Day at University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. A one day hands-on workshop covering aspects of osteology such as bone cleaning, rearticulation, restoration, identification and preparation.

 

News

The Palaeontological Association is advertising for a new Executive Officer, after the sad news of Tim Palmer’s retirement. Closing date for applications is 21st August 2015.

Did you know that Dubai Aquarium in the UAE has the world’s largest single piece of acrylic. It is pretty hefty at an impressive 70 cm thick, but it is not always with the most reliable seals, as they found out in 2010…

 

Around the Web

What do you do with a dead fish? Check out this blog for a unique idea: Printing and Reanimating the Dead.

**JURASSIC WORLD IS OUT** And smashing Box Office records. Of course. This review is great, but if you haven’t seen the film yet (firstly- why not? and secondly…) it contains spoilers!

 

Got a submission for the blog or Digital Digest? Email us at blog@natsca.org

Leicestershire Fashion in Detail: Using social media to engage new audiences with museum collections

This post is another in our series of presentation write-ups from the 2015 NatSCA Conference, Museums Unleashed!

 

The Animal Kingdom

The Animal Kingdom

Why?

Leicestershire Fashion in Detail was part of a larger project called Click; Connect; Curate; Create. Funded by Arts Council England as part of their Renaissance Strategic Support Fund, we wanted to find out how we could use ‘digital’ (whether that be technology or content creation) to increase engagement with our sites and collections. Fashion in detail was one a number of pilot projects including 3D scanning, augmented reality and wearable tech and digital storytelling.

What did we do?

For the purposes of this project we decided to utilise a number of existing images that we had of items from the costume collection. These images are close-up photographs of objects, ranging from menswear to accessories, womenswear to shoes, dating from the late 18th century to the present day. We commissioned dress historian Clare Bowyer to curate these images into a series of themes, and to write narrative for each image and each theme.

Why publish on social media and not an online collection resource?
We were going to use our collections online website but unfortunately this had to be taken down. We did have a picture library that had just been launched but, as its primary purpose was income generation, we didn’t want to distort its purpose by uploading images that we weren’t looking to sell.

As the aim of the project was to encourage engagement with collections we thought, ‘Instead of expecting audiences to come to us, why not go to them?’, and put our content on the platforms they use.

We settled on Tumblr, after considering a number of other image based platforms (including Pinterest and Flickr), as it works well with images and has a large fashion-based following.

Net overdress, c1910. Image of lace detail

Net overdress, c1910. Image of lace detail

What happened?

Since we began posting in October 2014, we have:

  • posted 191 images
  • received 949 ‘notes’ (these are interactions with the content in the form of likes and reblogs)
  • had 782 users interact with our content
  • gained 134 followers (and counting)

This is an average post engagement rate of 495.3%. In comparison to our picture library, our download rate is 0.98% and our average engagement rate on Pinterest is 1.47%.

Union metrics

Union metrics

Where relevant we would also link back to the collection if it was on our picture library, and as a result our social media referrals increased, not just from our own blogs but from other peoples’ too; 20% of social media referrals to our picture library are from Tumblr.

What did we learn?

1. Tag, tag, tag
Fundamentally with all social media, it’s about being discoverable, and for Tumblr it’s about using the right tags so that users can find your content and then hopefully reblog or like your posts. Knowing the right tags to use is down to a process of trial and error, but descriptive tags work best. Do your own research on what you think are popular tags, then look at what other tags have been used for that post and use them for your own.

Top Tags

Top Tags

2. Social media is about engagement, not broadcasting
The purpose of social media is to engage with audiences, not to just broadcast about what’s going on. It was something that was picked up in our development of a social media strategy. The strongest recommendation from that was to move away from broadcasting to engaging with our audiences; telling people about our collections was a perfect way to do this.

3. Experimentation is key
As with tagging, a lot of what makes good content is trial and error. Try something, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, look at why and try it again. If it does work, look at why it did and see if you can replicate it. We saw that images of our corsets were gaining the most engagement, so we have decided to create a Tumblr about our Symington corset collection.

4. Digital vs Physical
Our biggest learning outcome is that a digital visitor isn’t better or worse than a physical visitor; they are just different types of visitor. We have people from all over the world engaging with our collections who might not have found out about them if it wasn’t for Tumblr. They may never visit us in person, but at least they know we exist, and we have made our collections accessible to them and in a way that allows them to truly engage.

Session Geography - Google analytics

Session Geography – Google analytics

5. Naming your files
I didn’t mention this in my presentation, but the importance of a digital asset management strategy is key. Only some of the images used were labelled according to the garment they were from so I had to spend a month in the ‘Frock Box’ trying to identify the item from the image and updating the metadata accordingly. Whilst I relished my time exploring the collection, renaming all of the images was a pain.

What next?

Leicestershire Fashion in Detail has been such a success to us that we want to explore how we can develop it further. In regards to the overarching project CCCC, we are undertaking an evaluation and visioning exercise to see how we might be able to embed the learning from the project into the strategic delivery of the service.

 

Lucia Masundire
Project Manager – Click; Connect; Curate; Create
Leicestershire County Council

NatSCA Digital Digest

ChameleonYour weekly round-up of news and events happening in the world of natural sciences

Events

8th – 15th June: The Dodo Roadshow. To mark the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s nomination in this year’s Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year, the Oxford Dodo is touring the country, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, in just one week, visiting museums and galleries along the way!

17th – 18th June: Refloating the Ark: Connecting the public and scientists with natural history museums at Manchester Museum. Conference looking at how natural history collections can be used to engage effectively with the public and the scientific research community.

25 June: Collection Standards Infrastructure Project – Environmental Standards at NHM, London. Talk on standards for collections, display and storage and their implications.

 

News

A new species of theropod dinosaur from Wales has been discovered by experts from The University of Manchester, University of Portsmouth, and the National Museum Wales.

A rare meteorite stolen from an Australian museum may have been stolen to order. Scary stuff!

A study using museum collections has found that the world’s biodiversity might not be as diverse as we thought…

The World Museum in Liverpool has added a new Octopus called Polvo to its aquarium!

 

Around the Web

A dinosaur reading list for every dino enthusiast in your life!

David Gelsthorpe of Manchester Museum on how the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits tells the story of Ice Age animals.

NHM curator Erica McAlister has been re-curating flies. Big flies.

 

Got a submission for the blog or Digital Digest? Email us at blog@natsca.org

Objects, Meet World! Using Tumblr to Bring Collections to New Audiences

This post is another in our series of presentation write-ups from the 2015 NatSCA Conference, Museums Unleashed!

 

In 1901, Victorian tea trader Frederick Horniman opened his museum (The Horniman Museum and Gardens, in London) with the ideal of bringing the world to Forest Hill. His collections were vast and varied, encompassing Anthropology, Natural History, and Musical Instruments. They have been added to extensively over the years.

In 2012, the Horniman embarked on a three-year review of our Anthropology collections, Collections People Stories, with the aim of getting a clearer picture of what we now have and learning more about our objects, in order to inform a planned redisplay of some of our galleries.

The review project was an enormous undertaking, involving staff from across the museum as well as external experts and community groups. The progress of the project was shared on the museum’s blog, but we also wanted a more informal way to share the day-to-day work of our review team, and to highlight some of the amazing objects we saw every day as we ploughed systematically through the Study Collections Centre.

Boxes of objects in the Horniman's stored collection

A review in action: lots of coloured labels!

Tumblr fit the bill nicely: it is a microblogging (think very short-form) platform that can accommodate a variety of content, including text, pictures, video, and audio. We’ve found it works best with images, plus a small amount of text to explain what the object is and why it’s interesting. Posting is quick and simple, so it can fit into a busy workflow easily. Tumblr is also a great way of reaching a large audience with little initial effort, thanks to the snowball effect: followers can ‘reblog’ our posts, sharing them on their own page, and then other people reblog it on from there, and it can just keep going!

Our page, In the Horniman, was set up in September 2012. The review team were given control of the page, and let loose! Our agenda with Tumblr is not overtly educational; we aim simply to share our enthusiasm for the collections with our followers. We choose objects just because we like them – anything that makes us say ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ is an instant Tumblr candidate.

"Wow, that's amazing!" - a beautiful ceramic dragon from Uzbekistan (Image: Horniman Museum & Gardens)

“Wow, that’s amazing!” – a beautiful ceramic dragon from Uzbekistan (Image: Horniman Museum & Gardens)

We didn’t just want to share pretty pictures with our followers, though. We also wanted to encourage engagement. This is not as easy as it sounds, because of the way Tumblr works: followers can ‘like’ or ‘reblog’ posts with one click, but commenting is less common because it takes more effort. But without us even trying, it was happening: people were commenting on our posts, sometimes even telling us things we didn’t know about the objects. So we started an interactive feature called Stick of the Week, in which we share an image of a stick-like object and ask the good people of Tumblr to guess what it is. We have many such objects in the collection, and wanted to share them to highlight that any object can be interesting when you know its story! Stick of the Week sounds silly, but it has (hopefully!) got our followers looking at and thinking about objects differently, and allowed us to open up a dialogue.

Stick of the Week: a parrying dagger made of antelope horn

Stick of the Week: the reveal (Image: Horniman Museum & Gardens)

In The Horniman has achieved our aim to share the progress of the Collections People Stories review, and wildly exceeded our expectations. Since 2012 it has gained over 39,000 followers (up by 2,000 since I delivered this talk at NatSCA 2015!), received over 90,000 page views from 158 countries, and even won an award (Best Social Media at the Museums & the Web Awards 2014)! But the reason we keep doing it is the wonderful feedback from our audience:

Visitor feedback for In The Horniman Tumblr page

In The Horniman: people lobe it!

Tumblr has given us a platform to share our collections with audiences all over the world, and a new way to engage people with our objects. Mr. Horniman’s aim in founding the museum was to bring the world to Forest Hill. Through Tumblr, we are now bringing Forest Hill to the world.

Rachel Jennings
Documentation Assistant, Horniman Museum & Gardens

“This museum is disgusting, why did you kill these animals?”

This post is the first in our series of presentation write-ups from the 2015 NatSCA Conference, Museums Unleashed!

 

I was asked to deliver a natural history version of my social media challenge for NatSCA’s 2015 Museums Unleashed conference. The idea of the challenge, which I’ve run in the past with students and museum professionals who might be afraid of using social media, is to informally discuss how to respond, if at all, to difficult questions that might come in on social media.

Before the conference, I asked NatSCA members to suggest any real world examples of difficult comments and queries that any of them may have received through blogs, Twitter or other social media platforms that were challenging to respond to. Any museum professional worth their salt who has worked in the public galleries can very confidently deal with those tricky questions, ranging from “Did you kill all these animals?” through to “If we evolved from monkeys, why do men and women have a different number of ribs?”. However, with social media it’s different because those responses are ‘published’, and often the platform might not be best suited to dealing with complexity.

There are also considerations depending on guidelines or policies that your institution has in place; some museums seem to have a policy of broadcasting but not engaging, and others will have topics they just don’t engage in. Are you responding as the institution or is it clear that it’s your opinion? Do you have absolute freedom to say what you want on personal social media accounts, even though you may be using them on ‘work’ time (the answer is often no)?

"This museum is disgusting!" Mark lays out the challenge (Image: Grant Museum of Zoology, UCl (@GrantMuseum) via Twitter)

“This museum is disgusting!” Mark lays out the challenge (Image: Grant Museum of Zoology, UCl (@GrantMuseum) via Twitter)

The idea of the workshop was to work in teams to decide how to respond to some tricky social media situations sent in by natural history museum professionals from across the UK, and hopefully as a group show that it’s not always scary. Also, importantly, that you may not always wish to engage, but by using social media cleverly you can engage with your virtual audiences.

First up, though, were the team names. This session was the last formal session of a jam-packed conference, and it showed with the names that the UK’s best and brightest museum professionals came up with: #newbies, Team Celtic and Then Some, Is it Dead? Poke it, Social Six, Team Large, Come Back Right At You, The Con Artists, and the appropriately named Team Conference Fatigue. Exactly the mix of humour that works with social media.

The teams assemble (Image: Justine Aw (@NotCritters) via Twitter)

The teams assemble (Image: Justine Aw (@NotCritters) via Twitter)

There were five questions the teams drafted responses to:

  1. This museum is disgusting, why did you kill these animals?
  2. Why are we wasting taxpayer’s money on research into crab sex. What about cancer and the NHS?
  3. How can you justify taking donation money from an anti-climate change lobbyist?
  4. I went to that lecture last night and thought @MusSpeaker was a rubbish speaker!
  5. The animal in this photo is a moonfish not a southern opah!

On first reflection, these questions might set you squirming. Do you engage if it’s tough to respond in 140 characters? If you don’t engage, will it look like the museum is trying to hide something? The NatSCA members rose to the social media challenge, however, and came up with a range of serious, bold, funny, and thoughtful responses. I won’t got through all the ‘answers’ here, suffice to say the merits of crab sex research were defended, there was open discussion about museum ethics (which we rarely display in exhibitions), and a number of very honest responses perhaps spurred on by conference fever.

A selection of responses, both serious and silly (Image: Mark Carnall)

A selection of responses, both serious and silly (Image: Mark Carnall)

Overall most teams decided to engage rather than ignore any of these difficult responses. One top tip was to make sure you take a step back, as sometimes a hasty or heated response could create a social media storm. Some of these comments could be prompters for policy statements, blog posts, or even exhibitions, that address head-on some of the meatier issues that we may have been reticent to engage with in the past. Some of these could result in genuine engagement, as we saw with a real example of an insect sex tweet from the Natural History Museum, London, and some are an opportunity to show the more human side of the staff that work in, and make, museums.

The workshop got a lot of positive feedback, and hopefully rounded off the two day showcase of how social media can help rather than hinder all areas of museum work, and that engaging with the social side (the hint is in the name) is something to be embraced and not feared.

Mark Carnall
Curator – Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL