Tag Archives for museum collections

NatSCA Digital Digest – September 2024

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

Welcome to the September 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

GCG 51st Winter Seminar and AGM – Call for Abstracts Now Open

The Geological Curators Group have announced the details for their Winter Seminar Reciprocal Relationships: how can partnerships help us and our collections develop?  and AGM taking place at Oxford University Museum of Natural History 11 – 13th November 2024. The dates include an evening icebreaker, presentations, workshops, AGM, conference dinner and a field trip.

The deadline for abstracts is October 14th 2024. Please follow the link for further details: https://www.geocurator.org/events/180-agm51 .

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Bryozoans on the Move: Trials and Challenges of Packing Collections.

Written by Abbie Herdman, Curator of Invertebrates (Non-Insects), Natural History Museum, London.

The Natural History Museum, London (NHM) is currently undertaking one of the biggest collections moves in history, around 38 million specimens total (with 28 million moving off site). A diverse range of collections are expected to move to the new site in Reading including fossils, wet, dry, taxidermy and osteological specimens. This blog will focus on some examples and challenges faced when preparing the bryozoan collections to move.

Bryozoans are an astounding yet little known phylum of predominantly colonial aquatic invertebrate animals, found in both freshwater and marine ecosystems. Known as the ‘moss animals’, for a long time, they were thought to be plants which still confounds the record of this group in aquatic collections due to their growth patterns encrusting on rocks, as seaweed-like and sometimes as gelatinous blobs. There are bryozoan reefs which support diverse marine species, they are recognised bioindicators in aquatic habitats and are ‘blue carbon’ stores (Porter, J, S. et al., 2020).

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Creating a New Diorama at the Booth Museum of Natural History

Editors note: This is the second of two concurrent blogs about the new diorama at the Booth Museum. Click here to read the first and find out more about how the diorama was created.

Written by Su Hepburn, Head of Learning & Engagement, Brighton & Hove Museums.

Jazmine Miles-Long, Taxidermist © Laurence Dean Photography

Why a new diorama?

In the autumn of 2022, we started our ‘Discover our Dioramas’ project at the Booth Museum of Natural History, part of Brighton & Hove Museums. Funded by an Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund of £50,000 we set about building the first natural history diorama at the museum in 92 years. This was a significant project for a museum whose Victorian creator Edward Booth had lined every wall with dioramas of birds. Dioramas are an ideal way of storytelling. They are visual and can get a lot of key information to audiences without the need for words.

Alongside this we were also given £3000 from Rampion Windfarms to research and display more information about people especially women involved in the museum’s history. 

These projects gave us the time and space to be playful and to make friends. To impact on our audiences, our staff, our collections, and our future practices. It has brought joy to the museum, visitor and staff alike. 

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Creating a New Diorama for The Booth Museum of Natural History – Taxidermy, Silk flowers and Wax Slugs.

Editors note: This is the first of two concurrent blogs about the new diorama at the Booth Museum, you can read the second one here.

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

The Booth Museum of Natural History was founded in 1874 by naturalist and collector, Edward Thomas Booth. Mr Booth collected a huge variety of British birds and was a pioneer of the taxidermy ‘diorama’, displaying birds in their natural habitat. His collection of over 300 detailed cases were donated to the city of Brighton in 1891 with the proviso the dioramas would not be changed. In 1971 the Booth became a Museum of Natural History. Today alongside the dioramas the museum has a huge collection of 525,000 insects, 50,000 minerals and rocks, 30,000 plants and 5,000 microscopic slides.

Life in the Garden. Image credit: Laurence Dean.
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Dropping a Pin on the Salter Collection

Written by George Seddon-Roberts, PhD Student, John Innes Centre, work completed whilst on placement as a Curatorial Intern at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

When accessing an entomology collection, there are a few things that a researcher can expect to find. Each specimen should be pinned with labels describing its species and information about where it was collected – two valuable pieces of information which can help researchers to trace the specimen’s origin geographically and in time. Knowing where and when a specimen was collected can help researchers better understand the historical landscape and ecology and make predictions into the future. However, when collections receive specimens from private collectors, this standard of labelling might not be met. As part of a 3-month internship at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, I aimed to transform one such collection.

The collection in context 

John Henry Salter (1862-1942) was an academic and naturalist, who spent much of his life as a lecturer at University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he would later be appointed as the first Professor of Botany. Outside of academia, Salter was a prolific collector of insects across several groups, most notably including coleoptera (beetles) and lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Salter’s collection contains specimens from across Wales, as well as England, Tenerife and south-east France; regions where he spent time during his retirement. The specimens, which amount to over 15,000 individuals, were meticulously recorded in field logs by Salter, which were also donated to the museum with the collection.  

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