Category Archives for Projects

NatSCA Digital Digest – February 2025

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum

Welcome to the February edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

Digital Digest is 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

Save the Date: SPPC, June 26th – 27th 2025

The 30th Symposium on Palaeontological Preparation and Conservation will be held in the Netherlands this year on 26-27th June.

The theme will be From Excavation to Exhibition including aspects of the story of how geological collections end up on display in our museums, as well as their conservation and preparation. A call for abstracts and registration is coming soon. For more details visit: https://www.geocurator.org/events/97-sppc

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Birds of Bolton Museum

Written by Lauren Field, Curator of Natural History, Bolton Museum.

In June 2024 Bolton Museum launched a summer exhibition titled Birds of Bolton. This exhibition celebrated the incredible variety of bird life in Bolton and beyond and was inspired by the recent donation of a large collection of sketchbooks by Bolton-born artist and naturalist Eric Gorton (1929-2001).

Eric Gorton with his illustrations. © Bolton Museum

Dating from 1947 to 1998, the sketchbooks are the record of a lifelong love of birds and other local wildlife. His drawings capture the rich diversity of Bolton’s bird population – their shapes, colours, how they behave, and where they live. Eric Gorton spent over fifty years filling his sketchbooks with observations of birds in the field.

Pages from Eric Gorton’s sketchbook. © Bolton Museum

Gorton worked for Bolton Museum from 1947 to 1976. He worked initially as the museum taxidermist and later as Keeper of Natural History, and he helped to build one of the best collections of bird skins in the country which is still held at the museum today.

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Collecting Coventry, a Temporary Exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

Written by Ali Wells, Curator (Herbert Collections), Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

This blog post details a temporary exhibition at the Herbert, how it was presented, how decolonisation and feedback were integrated into the show. This is an overview, please get in touch if you would like more information on any aspect of the exhibition.

In May 2024 the Herbert launched its latest major temporary exhibition, Collecting Coventry. The display focuses on the history of collecting in Coventry museums and showcasing the breadth of the collections.

The main aims were to

  • Present the Herbert’s collections after several years of external or predominately loan-based temporary exhibitions.
  • Get out visitor favourites like the Lowry and display stored objects for the first time.
  • Look like a museum store.
  • Give visitors the opportunity to comment on aspects of museum work and ask questions relating to collections and displays. For example, Collections Development policy, display of human remains, use of technology, future exhibitions, representation.
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NatSCA Digital Digest – December 2024

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

Welcome to the December 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

NatSCA Conference & AGM 2025

The 2025 NatSCA conference Call for Papers is open! The deadline to submit is 5pm GMT Friday 17th January. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to the committee with questions. (conference@natsca.org) We look forward to reading your submissions!  

Making a Difference: Showing the Positive Impact of Natural History Collections

The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 8th and Friday 9th May 2025 at The University of Manchester, Manchester Museum.

Natural history collections are involved in a huge range of work that has enormous positive impacts on people and the planet – this is a conference to share these stories. The #NatSCA2025 conference invites proposals for presentations looking at impact, how our work is making a difference, how we measure it, how we show success, and how we advocate for collections.

We seek ideas from the natural history collections community, educators, collaborators, and beyond. We are interested in practical lessons, unique solutions, new collaborations, and to show what has and hasn’t worked. We are particularly looking for presentations that share the differences museums are making in:

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Addressing Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change Together: A Great Opportunity for Museums with Natural History Collections

Written by Henry McGhie, Curating Tomorrow, henrymcghie@curatingtomorrow.co.uk

This year has seen not one but two ‘COPs’ (Conference of the Parties), the big meetings where governments monitor their progress towards international agreements. In early November, COP16 for biodiversity was held in Cali, Colombia. In the second half of November, COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan. These big meetings get a lot of press attention, but they are rather poorly understood and are not always reported that well. If you think the COPs are where the leaders of the world get together to hammer out the world’s future, the reality is much more humdrum. By the time countries gather together, they have usually made up their minds on their negotiating positions and not much will change from there on. COP has also become too big and has many ‘layers’ to it. For the climate COPs, there is the Blue Zone, which you need to get a special accreditation to enter (referred to as a ‘badge’), and within that there will be really big plenary events and smaller side events that everyone with a badge can attend. There are also lots of negotiations taking place, inside rooms, that you often can’t access as well as a mass of pavilions, mostly from countries and in some years, businesses. Outside the Blue Zone, there is a public-facing Green Zone that the public can access (sometimes it is in a museum, as it was in 2021 when it was in Glasgow Science Centre). When the climate COP is on there is also a lot of activity going on outside of COP itself, mostly organized by civil society groups, and also by businesses. So, when people say they’ve ‘been to COP’ it can mean a few different things.

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