Tag Archives for idigbio

Ally Skills 101: Why Allies?

Presented by Hao Ye, University of Florida & Molly Phillips, Florida Museum of Natural History, iDigBio.

Abstract

Natural science collections are, by their nature, collaborative and cumulative, and benefit from the inclusion of diverse people with diverse experiences and backgrounds. Yet many of us recognize that our workplaces, and STEM at large, are not welcoming to all, even after decades of efforts. It is increasingly clear that one of the challenges is that we lack training in turning our shared values into action. In this talk, I will introduce ally skills as a path to change. An ally is a member of a social group that enjoys some privilege that is working to end oppression and understand their own privilege (Frame Shift Consulting). We introduce ally skills via workshops offered by the Gainesville Ally Skills Network. In these workshops we teach people how to recognize when they have power and influence to act as an ally and take effective action to make their workplace more inclusive.

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Borderless Collections – Starting a Collections Community (R)evolution

by Deborah Paul (iDigBio) and Isla Gladstone (Senior Curator of Natural Sciences, Bristol Culture)

The heroes. Our natural sciences collections, collections staff, the planet and all the players worldwide (thanks Shakespeare).

Some of the heroes’ dilemmas. Need for online access to collection specimen data for research, dwindling habitat, damaged planet resources, one-of-a-kind objects, minimal staff, need for financial support and expertise, and an urgent need to reach and engage a broader audience if we are to succeed in addressing these dilemmas. Some actors know their roles, others don’t even know they are part of the story.

With support from the John Ellerman Foundation for the South West Area Natural Sciences collections (SWANS) project, Bristol City Council’s Culture Team (based at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), the Natural History Museum (UK), and iDigBio, jointly created two workshops. Both of these events serve as part of a coordinated effort to envision and create a robust UK regional digital natural sciences collections program that supports research, engagement and skills, and connects directly to local, national, and international programs now and in the future. The vision includes plans to repeat the second workshop across the UK.

Materials. All materials and talks can be found on the respective workshop wikis: UK Strategy and SWANS Practical Digitisation.

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Digitisation

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Today we have Lukas Large, curatorial trainee with the Birmingham Museums Trust, on digitisation:

The theme of this year’s SPNHC2014 meeting was ‘Historic Collections: Future Resources’. Digitisation was featured as one of the main topics as this is an important way that collections are being made accessible to researchers and new audiences.

The talks described a wide variety of digitisation projects from the enormous Paris Herbarium which ran for 4 years and created images of 5.3 million specimens to Arkansas State Herbarium with 18,000. Many of the projects involved herbarium sheets as these are relatively easy to image but an amazing variety of objects have been digitised including fossils at GB3D Type Fossils, insects and even historic slide collections.

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Extracting the information from specimen labels is an important but potentially expensive and time consuming process so many museums have started to use crowd sourcing to perform tasks such as transcribing specimen labels. Laurence Livermore discussed several successful examples such as Herbaria@home which has been running since 2007 and has a dedicated team of digital volunteers who have contribute 135,000 transcriptions.

These new uses of collections show just how important it is that these objects are properly cared for. Without the museum staff that have looked after these objects, we would not have them to digitise. Without ongoing care, researchers will not be able to study them in the future.

Slides from the talks are available on the iDigBio website as well as detailed descriptions of the protocols and tools used by different projects which are extremely useful for anyone planning their own digitisation project.

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