Tag Archives for communication

NatSCA Digital Digest – May 2024

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

Welcome to the May 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

Registration is now open for the 13th European Bird Curators Meeting, October 2024, in Liverpool.

The European Bird Curators Meetings aim to promote cooperation, dissemination of best practices and new techniques in the curation, management, and use of bird collections. Presenters in the scientific programme often include curators, collection managers, museum historians and ornithological researchers. These are friendly meetings and anyone with an interest is welcome to join us.

The meeting will include plenary and submitted presentations, discussion sessions, collections tour, conference dinner (optional – Tuesday 29th October) and field excursion (optional – Thursday 31st October). 

Please follow the ‘Tickets available here’ link from the event webpage to register. They have single day registration options and have kept costs as low as possible to encourage attendance by local natural history curators. 

If you have any questions, please email vertebratezoology@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk.

SPPC 2024 – Call for Abstracts

The Symposium on Palaeontological Preparation and Conservation is accepting submissions regarding work on all types of geological collections (not just palaeontology), for their upcoming conference.

Contact Lu Allington-Jones, Principal Conservator at the Conservation Centre, Natural History Museum London, for more information.

Registration is open for SHNH International Summer Meeting.

‘The Palette of Nature’: SHNH International Summer Meeting will be held at National Museum Cardiff, Thursday 13 – Friday 14 June 2024, with visits on Friday afternoon 14 June.

This two-day international meeting will explore the use and importance of colour within the history of natural history. For centuries, the colours of the natural world have enticed and enthralled observers and led them to develop various means by which to convey this aspect of nature. The aesthetic appeal of certain colours of gemstones or of particular dyes and pigments derived from plants and minerals is apparent in many cultures.

More information can be found here.

Megalosaurus Appeal: Is our Dinosaur Hiding in your Family Album?

2024 is the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur – Megalosaurus! The type specimens are held in the collections at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH), where they have been part of Oxford University collections since Buckland first described them in his 1824 paper “Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield”. These type specimens include the iconic jawbone, recognised around the world by dinosaur researchers and enthusiasts alike.

OUMNH are working on a project to fill in some archival gaps in the timeline of Megalosaurus fossils on display. They are therefore appealing to the public for any photographs taken of these fossils at the Museum, any time before 1990.

If you (or you know of anyone who may have) visited OUMNH during the 1900s (or even 1800s!), they would be grateful if you could seek out and dust off the old photo albums and look for images of the Museum’s fossil dinosaur displays.

They would be grateful if photos could be digitised and sent to library@oum.ox.ac.uk, however, the quality is not important (a quick and easy digital photo taken of your physical photo is fine, for example), so long as the image is clear. If digitisation is not possible, please do get in touch with them so they can try and facilitate another way.

They won’t ask you to donate your images but may request permission to use and/or store a digital copy, if appropriate. Closing date for submissions is 14th June 2024.

Fine print: OUMNH does not assume copyright or permission for use of any images sent to us. If a photograph is of particular interest, OUMNH will contact you to request permission to use and/or store the image/s, but you are not under obligation to do so. No financial reward is offered.

NatSCA Lunchtime Chats

The new lunchtime chats are for members only and run on the last Thursday of every month.

This series is supposed to be informal, no fancy equipment is needed, it will be put out over the NatSCA Zoom platform and there is no fixed format. For those who want to take part please email training@natsca.org to put forward your idea. All members will have received a link to join via Zoom (the same link works for all sessions) – if you haven’t, get in touch with membership@natsca.org

Where to Visit

Mansfield Museum has opened a new permanent gallery: A World of Birds

The new gallery includes over 600 birds of nearly 500 species, including spectacular 19th/early 20th century display cases of birds from various parts of the world; historically important specimens including several ‘firsts’ for Britain (Harlequin Duck and Egyptian Nightjar); and a number of ‘albinos’ from a collection of abnormally coloured birds. The gallery aims to connect the Museum’s historic collections with contemporary environmental challenges and public interest in the environment. The gallery was made possible with funding from ACE Unlocking Collections fund, and the Museum’s NPO funding.

Planet Ocean exhibition at The Box, Plymouth

Plymouth is ‘Britain’s Ocean City’ and we are all part of one connected ocean. Come and immerse yourselves in an exhibition that explores pivotal moments in our past and present relationship with the sea. The exhibition uses the overarching themes of plankton, pollution, people and planet to share facts, key findings, objects and stories; inspiring hope in the face of the climate crisis and empowering everyone who visits to become ocean advocates.

Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am-5pm and bank holidays. Admission is free. No need to book. For more information check out the web page.

What to Read

We have a number of fabulous articles on the Blog, including:

Feeling Older than Your Age? The Importance of Museum Collections for Radiocarbon Dating, and a Request for Collections containing Bivalves Collected Before 1950 from the UK written by Rachel Wood, explores the importance of radiocarbon dating in museums and makes a call out for bivalve specimens.

Thinking of ways to explore the historical stories locked in your collections? Check out Trip to Another World – Digitalising and Decolonising Thomas Drummond’s ‘Musci Americani’ by Su Liu.

Where to Work

Kew is advertising for a Microscope Slide Digitisation Officer, closing date May 19th.

The University of the West Indies Zoology Museum is looking for a Curator, closing date May 26th. Find more details here.

Before You Go…

If you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest please drop an email to blog@natsca.org. Similarly, if you have something to say about a current topic, or perhaps you want to tell us what you’ve been working on, we welcome new blog articles so please drop Jen an email if you have anything you would like to submit.

Divorced or Separated? Naming the Specimens on Display at the Zoologisches and Palaontologisches Museum, Zurich.

Written by Richard Crawford, who has just completed a PhD thesis at the University of the Arts London, entitled ‘Re-presenting taxidermy, Contemporary Art interventions in Natural History Museums’.

Do people read labels in museums? If they do, what do they learn about the object on view? It has been the custom to use labels to give factual names to the things on display in scientific museum displays, but Art curators have taken a different approach and put titles to works that suggest a particular reading of the artwork. These may be suggested by the artist. A good example of this style of labelling is Damien Hirst’s ‘Mother and Child divided’, an artwork that used preserved specimens.

For this work, Damien Hirst famously sawed a cow and a calf in half and exhibited the separate halves in tanks filled with formaldehyde, which he placed apart with sufficient space for a viewer to walk between the two halves of each animal carcass so that they could observe the internal organs of both cow and calf. When it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1995, it helped win him the Turner Prize. The title was ironic. Hirst’s work critiques romantic depictions of the animal as part of harmonious natural order, a place in which mothers protect and nurture their young according to supposedly universal maternal instincts. In place of natural harmony, he presented the viewer with the disjuncture and division brought about by human intervention that brought early death to these two animals, destined for the meat market.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – March 2024

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

Welcome to the March 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 2024

Registration is open for the 2024 Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association. Trials and Triumphs: sharing practice across the museum sector will be held on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th April 2024 in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This practical conference aims to celebrate triumphs and amplify successes in museums, but also highlights pitfalls and lessons learned from situations that didn’t go as planned. Members – please remember to contact membership@natsca.org for your promotional code to release discounted tickets.

The event will be physical/digital hybrid, with attendees able to attend in person or online via Zoom. Follow the link for more details and to register.

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What is Taxidermy? An Intimate Relationship between Death and Maker.  

Written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist. https://www.jazminemileslong.com, Twitter: @TaxidermyLondon; Instagram: @Jazmine_miles_long

For taxidermy to exist an animal must have died. This brutal truth creates unease and leaves the viewer to ponder how the death occurred. And secondly how the death and the body is managed. A fluffy rabbit, cute and cuddly in life, suddenly becomes hideous and untouchable in death. Due to my profession, I am raising a child who has been exposed to dead animals and the concept of death his whole life. This has not made him desensitised to death, I’d say the opposite. He is deeply hurt by the death of any animal; he is a self-proclaimed vegetarian and last week at the age of 4 he asked me if his job when he grows up could be to stop people eating animals. He shouts at cars to slow down in case they hit anything and one of my favourite things he asks me when we meet new people is if they are a vegetarian or a carnivore eyeing them up suspiciously. Does a good understanding of death at a young age give a person greater empathy for animals and take us closer to not seeing them as ‘other’? 

When my son is asked what a taxidermist does, he says they look after animals when they die. I get at least one phone call a week from someone mourning their dead pet, I give advice on what to do next, ideas for memorials and how to store the body in the freezer while they decide what to do. I didn’t expect as a taxidermist to be a councillor, a listening ear, someone who is qualified to talk about death. 

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Unpacking the Unnatural History Museum (Season 1)

Written by Verity Burke, John Pollard Newman Fellow of Climate Change and the Arts, University College Dublin.

Blaschka Models. Image credit: courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland: Natural History.

We’re at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported on the devastating trajectory of the climate crisis. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, mediated in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. While the natural world has always been mediated in the museum space, what does this mediation mean now for natural history museums and collections, and the natures they present?

These are some of the questions which drive my research into museum representations of the natural world, and was the inspiration behind putting together an event series called ‘The Unnatural History Museum: Mediating Nature in the Sixth Mass Extinction’ (part of the Irish Research Council-funded project ‘Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum’ at Trinity College Dublin). I was keen to make a space to have these conversations across disciplines and sectors (something which we get surprisingly few opportunities to do, despite often working on similar topics or issues), to allow us to share what we were doing and discuss why. This blog is a short overview of the topics that the first season of the Unnatural History Museum engaged with from September 2022 to April 2023, with some excitement about what arose in the first season, and in anticipation of continuing these conversations in a planned second season.

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