Category Archives for Uncategorized

NatSCA Digital Digest – July 2025

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

Welcome to the July 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

Geological Collections Group – Dinosaur trackways field workshop

There is still time to register for the GCG Dinosaur Trackways field workshop, happening later this month on the 24th July.

This one-day field workshop will teach participants how to clean out large sauropod footprints and, take measurements of both isolated prints and entire trackways. This is a practical field workshop, with hands on experience of working with dinosaur trackways. For this reason, participants must be able to move across uneven ground unaided.

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Bark Tanning Skins into Leather for Taxidermy – A Sustainable, Natural and Non-harmful Alternative to Commercial Tanning Products?

Written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist.

When a taxidermy mount is made, the skin of the mammal (and in some cases reptiles and birds) is usually tanned. Tanning is the process of turning a raw skin into leather using chemistry. By turning the skin into leather, we are changing a fragile perusable material into something durable that can be sculpted into taxidermy and be more resistant to insect attack. Tanning the skin involves removing proteins in the skin and loosening the collagen fibres and then attaching tannins to these structures. Leather can be made with either the hair on or off the skin. When we are making taxidermy, we want the fur to stay attached to the skin and so the process is different to when the fur is to be removed. With hair on tanning, we want the pH to stay low to prevent the fur from falling out. The skin starts by going into a pickle solution of around pH 2 and after it has been through the tanning process it ends up at about pH 4.5 -5.

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Planet Ocean: Using Local Collections to Celebrate Global Climate Action

Written by Sarah Marden, Curator of Natural History at The Box, Plymouth.

From March 2024 to April 2025, a new exhibition at The Box called Planet Ocean explored Plymouth’s marine heritage and contemporary identity as “Britain’s Ocean City”. Specimens from our natural history collections, including spirit-preserved marine invertebrates, molluscs, corals, mounted sea birds and seaweed folios were displayed alongside art, world cultures collections, image and film and loan material from local partners.

Flowers of the Sea folio by Emily Johns, © Dom Moore

Taking inspiration from science fiction writer and undersea explorer Arthur C Clarke who said “how inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly ocean”, we explored why the ocean is so important- the fact that we literally couldn’t survive without it as it gives us around half the oxygen we breathe, but also that it sustains and supports us locally with food, jobs, leisure, health and wellbeing. Alongside this quote, the entrance wall of the exhibition featured a moving graphic created collaboratively with Plymouth Marine Laboratory. It used one of the oldest datasets in existence of changing ocean temperatures recorded in Plymouth Sound. This data was input into a globe representing our ocean planet that changed and distorted according to the human impact of climate change over time. This was the first example of science meeting art and partnerships that we developed throughout the exhibition.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – June 2025

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

Welcome to the June 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 2025 Recording 

On May 8th and 9th 2025, NatSCA hosted ‘Making a Difference: Showing the Positive Impact of Natural History Collections’, the 2025 NatSCA Conference at the Manchester Museum. This conference was recorded and can now be viewed online on our YouTube channel here.

Society for the History of Natural History Summer Meeting 2025 – online registration open

The SHNH are offering an online attendance option for this year’s summer meeting, ‘A Sense of Nature’ on 19th and 20th June 2025. Registration for in-person attendance has now closed.

The conference will explore the intersections of the senses – including sight (vision), sound (hearing), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation) and touch (tactile perception) – with the history of natural history. The programme will feature 12 papers across six sessions.

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5 Top Tips on How to Decant your Museum

By Eimear Ashe, Collections Moves Project Manager, National Museum of Ireland

Having recently completed a major decant of Natural History collections in the National Museum of Ireland, I thought it a perfect opportunity to share my learnings with fellow NatSCA colleagues.

National Museum of Ireland – Natural History

Tip 1. Start with the staff!

  • What skills do you need to recruit in or increase capacity in?
  • Recruit new temporary staff. Training should be provided in the following areas: hazards in collections, manual handling, object handling, photography (if part of the workflow), condition assessment, object packing, transfer documentation procedures, integrated pest management (IPM), and the collections management system.
  • If you cannot recruit new staff, you will have to use existing resources. Agree with management that the permanent staff team will not be able to carry on their regular duties during the period of decant. You should also make the public aware of this reduction in capacity and service provision.
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