Category Archives for Using Collections

NatSCA Digital Digest

 

NatSCA 2

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

Conferences and Workshops

As PalaeoSam mentioned in the last Digital Digest, the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontolotgy and Comparative Anatomy is on next week. It is my personal palaeo highlight of the year and so am sad that I will miss it this year. (Though not too sad given I am missing it to be in Italy for the Grand Prix.) If you are attending and would like to do a super write up of the weeks’ events, please do let us know.  I look forward to experiencing SVPCA through the eyes of a blogger.

Jaguar

Those of you who are fans of F1 will know why this car is relevant to natural history (image in public domain)

News

Not really on the subject of natural history, but a topic that will touch the heart of any museum professional or visitor. ISIS have taken even more away from the us, the global nation, via the destruction of an Ancient temple in Palmyra. These open air museums are original sites of cultural heritage and are irreplaceable once gone. Not at the top of the list of the most tragic event of the last couple of weeks by any means, but a sad day for museums nevertheless.

News from the Blogosphere

The #MuseumInstaSwap phenomenon has launched as staff from some of the top museums in London (including the NHM and the Horniman) swap museums and take to social media to chat about it. An article in Time Out nicely summarises what is going on but a lot of the museums involved have their own exciting blogs on it worth looking up. Hence this is in the News from the Blogosphere section, see?

Highlights from the Papers

More and more, scientists are relying on Citizen science, as a means of collecting data. The mode of research is especially important in fields such as marine biology where the incorporation of sightings made by anglers, for example, can add significantly increase the size of datasets. An article in Nature called Rise of the Citizen Scientist explores the good the bad and the ugly of this practice as a research tool.

 

As ever, if you would like to write a blog for NatSCA on anything natural sciences related, give us an online shout blog@natsca.org.

NatSCA Digital Digest

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

Jobs

Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL I can tell you from three years of first-hand experience (pseudo-first-hand; as curatorial assistant) that this is the job all curators should be applying for. The Grant Museum of Zoology is an amazing place to work and in this role I know you will have the opportunity to spread your curatorial wings and make a real difference in the natural history sector. The kind of job where you don’t mind getting up in the morning. Closing date for applications is 3rd August. Good luck!

If only for the superb job title, anyone with experience of learning programmes for families and children with ASC (Autistic Spectrum Condition) should definitely take a look at the current vacancy for the Dawnosaurs Programme Co-ordinator at the Natural History Museum. This looks like an amazing opportunity for the right person. The closing date for applications is the 22nd July.

See the job page of the NatSCA website for more exciting opportunities.

News

The next Museums Association exhibition and conference is due to take place on 5th and 6th November, in Birmingham. There is still time to register as an early bird who gets the cheaper worm rates. Early bird registration ends on the 7th August, click here for more.

Around the Web

Sun bear, fox, hippo or pangolin. What tickles your natural history bones the most? Choose your favourite to be the new museum mascot for Derby Museum and Art Gallery! If you are on Twitter, you can whip up some support for the sun bear, errr, I mean, your favourite using: @DMNature and @derbymuseums. The winning specimen will be announced on the 7th August. I’ve already chosen mine, can you guess what it is…?

The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs have been working up a storm of support lately, with ongoing events at the park complemented by a very dynamic talk at the Grant Museum by the master of science comedy- Prof Joe Cain, from UCL. These incredible statues are a vivid reminder of the evolution our concept of dinosaur appearances has gone through. They are also an important part of our British cultural heritage, that helped shape the palaeontological world in the mid 1800s. Find out more about these iconic statues that are in desperate need of conservation on the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs website.

 

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

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival and collections advocacy: 10 years on since the birth of the greatest rock festival in history

When I say I’m going to a fossil festival, the reaction of friends who aren’t natural history geeks is often somewhat quizzical. It’s not exactly Glastonbury, is it? But I would argue that those of us who care passionately about museum collections, and return to Lyme Regis every year, are just as rock ‘n’ roll as the line-up at Glastonbury.

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival is one of the most successful examples of collections advocacy that I have seen, and it meets a wide variety of audiences over four days, working with Primary and Secondary schools and the general public. The fossil festival this year celebrated its 10th anniversary, and I wanted to share some examples of the good practice I’ve seen.

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival in full swing (Image: Anthony Roach)

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival in full swing (Image: Anthony Roach)

Museums are just history, right?

Luanne Meehitiya from Birmingham Museums reminded us, in her collections advocacy summary at the 2014 NatSCA conference, that the public may perceive museums as places of history, not as custodians of scientifically and culturally important collections. The surge in social media and targeted events means visitors are increasingly aware of the scientific research that takes place in museums. The Natural History Museum (NHM) and other regional museums presenting at Lyme Regis can engage audiences who don’t visit them regularly, or who see museums as simply about preserving history.

Prof. Paul Smith from Oxford University Museums also emphasised that natural science and historical collections can and should contribute to 21st century debates within society. The fossil festival doesn’t just celebrate palaeontology, and the Life Sciences team have a strong presence at Lyme, actively engaging the public with research that contributes to debates around climate change, invasive species, and the loss of biodiversity.

Myself and colleagues from the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity spent time talking about a new citizen science project called ‘Orchid Observers’, which inspires visitors to look for 29 of the 56 species of orchids in the UK. By encouraging the public to record their sightings, we hope to build a dataset to see how orchids are adapting to climate change, and how this is affecting flowering times. Using original herbarium sheets, we explained how the problems of over-collecting and environmental degradation have contributed to the decline of orchids.

Members of the AMC team

Members of the Life Sciences team from the AMC from left to right Mike, Jade and Chloe on the stand (Image: Anthony Roach)

What do people in museums actually do?

The fossil festival is great at highlighting the amazing work of curators, researchers and scientists, and promotes careers in the museum sector. An excellent example this year was Luanne and Isla Gladstone’s ‘Be A Curator’ activity, where visitors chose a specimen and then had to label it with the age, locality, date, and scientific name. Not only do young people get to meet real curators, they gain an understanding of their work too!

Luanne Meehitiya exploring curation with a young visitor to the festival

Luanne Meehitiya exploring curation with a young visitor to the festival (Image: Anthony Roach)

How can we learn more about museum specimens?

Alex Ball from the Imaging and Analysis Centre at NHM probably has the coolest job I know. He spends his days using chemical, CT, and other scanning technologies to explore natural history specimens. Alex is a continual presence at the festival, and this year he was using a structured light 3D scanner to scan museum specimens for visitors. It scans the object with several cameras and constructs a 3D model that can be examined from different angles.

CT-scanned museum objects were also displayed on screens for visitors to investigate. This technology has enabled conservators to better conserve the beautiful Blaschka glass models, because they can understand how they were made. Researchers can also learn a wealth of information – from the morphology of mummified cats to the structure of meteorites – in a way that is non-invasive and keeps the specimen intact.

Alex Ball and his team from the Imaging Lab with the structured light 3D scanner

Alex Ball and his team from the Imaging Lab with the structured light 3D scanner (Image: Anthony Roach)

These are just some of the examples from a fossil festival that places museum collections, curators, and scientists at the forefront of the visitors’ experience. The festival clearly exposes the past, present, and future use of collections and current scientific research. It also continues to remind us of the amazing scientific discoveries of people like Mary Anning and William Smith, to inspire future generations of scientists, geologists, naturalists, and artists. Long may it continue!

 

Anthony Roach
Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity, NHM

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