Category Archives for References

NatSCA Digital Digest – April 2026

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

Welcome to the April 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 Annual Conference & AGM 2026: Registration Now OPEN!

Booking is now open for the Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) held on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May 2026 at The Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This year’s theme is: Collaborating and Connecting with Natural History.

Due to limited venue capacity, the conference is limited to 120 places. Please follow this link to the conference page to find out more information: https://www.natsca.org/event/2924.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. If you would like to become a member, which would qualify you for the conference discount or bursaries, please see our website for details.

Please note that the early bird discount ends on the 14th April so get in quick if you want to get the cheaper rate!

Continue reading →

An Inspired Approach to Tail Repair: The Conservation of an Arctic Fox Mount

Written by Madalyne Epperson, Assistant Conservator, Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM).

The Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), located in downtown Milwaukee, is Wisconsin’s natural history museum. It opened to the public in 1884 and houses more than four million objects. The Museum is currently undertaking a multi-year effort to pack its extensive collections and relocate to a newly constructed building, due to open in 2027. I joined the MPM team in September 2025 to prepare roughly two thousand objects for display in the new building, which will be called the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin. One of my first assignments was to stabilize a full body arctic fox and ptarmigan predation mount.

Continue reading →

Darwin and Marx in the Museum. A review of Joel Wainwright’s ‘The End: Marx, Darwin and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis’.

Written by Joe Rigby, Senior Lecturer, University of Chester: Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

‘Storehouses for dinosaur bones, mineral samples, and fading dioramas portraying early humans. Do such places have something to tell us about capitalism and the climate crisis?’ (Wainwright 2025, p. 8)

Attached cover image of Joel Wainwright’s The End

As readers of the Natsca blog will appreciate, the discipline of ‘natural history’ encompasses a wide range of what today have become institutionalised as more or less separate fields of knowledge, including geology, biology, geography, anthropology, and history. In The End: Marx, Darwin and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis Joel Wainwright argues that recovering this kind of knowledge of ‘the history of nature and the role of nature in history’ (Wainwright 2025, p. 8) is essential to help address the current climate crisis. Whilst Wainwright is hardly the first person to make such a claim about the importance of natural history today, The End makes a convincing case for the importance of drawing jointly on the ideas of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in order to do so.

Continue reading →

NatSCA Digital Digest – January 2026

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

Welcome to the January 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 2026 – Call for Papers

In partnership with the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, NatSCA would like to announce our upcoming 2026 conference, Collaborating and Connecting with Natural History.

We invite proposals that demonstrate effective partnerships and creative collaborations with museums, as well as outside organizations.

The conference itself will take place from May 14th and 15th.

Guidance for attendance and proposals can be found on the event page here. Please read the Call for Papers submission form at the above link for more details! Submissions are due by 5:00 pm GMT on Sunday the 8th of February.

Continue reading →

Top NatSCA Blogs of 2025

Compiled by Jennifer Gallichan, NatSCA Blog Editor.

It has come to the end of another year and we have had some fantastic contributions to the blog. I would like to take this opportunity in the last blog of 2025, to celebrate the ten most read articles of those published this year. As a whole, they represent the huge amount of work that is going on across the sector, from collection decants, to specimen conservation, getting the collections out there, and researching the incredible histories they contain. What a busy bunch of folk we are!

I want to express a huge thankyou to all contributors. The blog truly would not work without you and it is entirely thanks to all your hard work that it is the success it is. With this in mind…the 2026 calendar is now open for submissions, so please do drop me a line if you would like to submit an article. Myself and our thousands of readers would love to hear from you.

The top ten blogs in descending order are:

Continue reading →