Tag Archives for museum

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

Tweeting up a Storm

With the theme of last week’s 2015 NatSCA Conference being sharing collections through social media, there was much discussion about Twitter and the many natural science-related hashtags that abound. So we thought we should compile a list, to make it easier for people wanting to get involved to know what’s out there!

For those new to Twitter, a few pointers:

  • It doesn’t matter how you write hashtags (some capitalisation/all lower case), but capitalising the first letter of each word can make them easier to read, and removes the risk of embarrassing unintended meanings (remember #susanalbumparty?).
  • If you’re starting a new hashtag, search for it first on Twitter to see if it already exists and if so, how it’s used. Also don’t make it too long. It will eat up your 140 characters, and other people will be less likely to use it.
  • When tweeting about an event, find out if there is an official hashtag. If you’re the organiser, communicate what it is! There were so many variations used for International Museum Day this year that it was confusing. This also dilutes the pool of tweets that people will see if they’re following one of several hashtags for the same event, and makes it more difficult to compile them in Storify.

Weekly Hashtags

There are many hashtags based on days of the week:

Monday

#BotanicMonday

#MaggotMonday

#MewseumMonday

#MineralMonday

#MolluscMonday

Tuesday

#TaxidermyTuesday

#TaxonomyTuesday

#TrilobiteTuesday

Wednesday

#WaspWednesday

#WeevilWednesday

#WombatWednesday

#WormWednesday

#WrasseWednesday

Thursday

#TherapodThursday

#ThinSectionThursday

Friday

#FluidFriday

#FlyFriday

#FossilFriday

#FungusFriday

Saturday

#SauropodSaturday

#ScienceSaturday

#SeaBirderSaturday

#SpiderSaturday

Sunday

#ScienceSunday

A Toxodon skull from @NHM_London for #FossilFriday

A Toxodon skull from @NHM_London for #FossilFriday

Others

There are lots of other natural science and museum-related hashtags out there, for use any time!

#CreaturesFBTS – Creatures from behind the scenes. Share images of amazing specimens from your stored collections.

#NatSciFashion – Natural science fashion. A new one to come out of this year’s NatSCA conference! Share images of your fabulous natural science-related wardrobe/bags/accessories!

#SciArt and #BioArt – Share your scientific artworks.

#MuseumDocumentation – Explain what documentation work you’re doing, and why it’s important, in only 140 characters (120 once you’ve added the hashtag). Try it, it’s quite a challenge!

#MuseumSelfie – Share selfies in your museum or with your specimens! There is also a Museum Selfie Day. The next one is on 20th Jan 2016.

#MuseumShelfie – What’s on your museum shelves?

And there are many, many more! Museum Week, organised by @CultureThemes, is also a really good event to get involved with on Twitter. It features seven different themed hashtags over seven days, and is now an international affair. A great way to reach new audiences and share your collections! It ran in March 2015, and will be back for 2016. Culture Themes also organise special museum-related hashtags throughout the year, so keep an eye on their site for upcoming days.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who offered suggestions! What have I missed? What are your favourites?

Rachel Jennings, NatSCA Blog Editor

#MuseumWeek on Twitter – what’s the point?

The last few days have seen Twitter alive with activity centred on museums, with the 2015 #MuseumWeek hashtag providing an opportunity to celebrate culture using images, videos and a maximum of 140 characters.

MuseumWeek

This Twitterstorm in a teacup may seem a bit pointless to some, but it’s difficult to fully appreciate the value of social media until you really use it and experience the benefits first hand.

That’s why this year’s NatSCA conference ‘Museums Unleashed’ is partly about getting everyone up to speed with what’s out there, how it works, and what people are using it for – to make sure that our members aren’t left behind as the museum sector increasingly embraces the digital age.

natscabristol2015

Social media provides an incredibly powerful medium for communicating with other subject specialists, and it also provides a mechanism for developing genuine dialogue with audiences. Hashtags like #MuseumMonday and #FossilFriday allow objects from behind the scenes to be shared around the world quickly and easily, bringing otherwise hidden collections into the public consciousness.

The playful and informal nature of these online interactions may be a significant departure from the authoritative and reserved image projected by some museums, perhaps causing a little discomfort for some, but that informal interaction is the very thing that makes social media such a fantastic mechanism for developing dialogue and bouncing ideas between peers.

Finally, it never pays to underestimate the power of the public as advocates for your collections. A museum with a facilitative approach to social media in its gallery spaces can benefit from the buzz created by people wanting to create and curate their own digital content, inspiring others to visit and generating a deeper interest in the museum’s activities – with minimal input required from staff.

I strongly suggest that you take a look at the various interesting subthemes within #MuseumWeek to see if you can contribute. Today is #familyMW, Saturday is #favMW (for your favourites) and Sunday is #poseMW (maybe put that selfie stick to good use?), so you still have time to get your phone out and get involved!

Unidentified, Not Unloved: On New Species and Stewardship

There are hundreds of millions of specimens held in natural history collections in museums worldwide, collected over centuries by thousands of experts and enthusiasts. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that new species are ‘discovered’ in museums on a regular basis. These discoveries generally fall into two categories:

  1. Specimens that have never previously been identified
  2. Specimens that have been re-identified

All museums have unidentified and misidentified material in their collections. It is inevitable, given the enormous number of specimens and species that are involved. These are all potential new species, just waiting to be described.

Since I took on the voluntary role of Facebook Editor for NatSCA last year, I’ve read a lot of news stories while searching for content to share on the page, many of them about new species being found in museum collections. And I’ve been more than a little disappointed at the language chosen by the journalists to describe the specimens. The words ‘forgotten’ and ‘overlooked’ crop up frequently in headlines, and stories often describe specimens as having been ‘ignored’, ‘languishing’ in collections, or left ‘sitting in boxes’. This choice of words adds drama to a story for the papers, but it reflects poorly on the museums involved, and the inherent implications of neglect are both unfair and untrue. Having unidentified or wrongly identified specimens in a collection does not imply a failing on the part of the curatorial staff; nobody can be an expert in everything, and to identify one specimen among thousands as belonging to a previously unknown species requires an enormous amount of specialist knowledge and lots of research (often taking years). The important thing is that the specimens are preserved and cared for, so that experts are able to come in and examine them.

Drawer of various brightly coloured beetles, organised in neat rows with labels

Things Organised Neatly: Stewardship is fundamental to curatorship

Stewardship is the fundamental responsibility of the curators in charge of their collections. An unidentified specimen has not been forgotten. The average ‘shelf life’ of a specimen belonging to a new species, from discovery to publication, is over 20 years, and can be more than 200 years! This is due to the sheer volume of material that is collected in the field and donated to museums every year, and the expertise needed for identification. As the study of biodiversity (and the loss thereof) becomes more important to conservation efforts, more academics are turning to museums for data on population trends over time. The negative language used in these news articles could harm this relationship, and possibly deter specialists from engaging with museums. And with budget cuts increasingly affecting museum resources, curators want to engage with academics, artists, and other users, now more than ever.

The good news is that this problem is not entirely universal: recent news coverage of the discovery of a new species of ichthyosaur in Doncaster Museum was generally very positive about the value of natural history collections, mainly due to the enthusiasm of the researchers, which came across strongly in their quotes.

Rachel Jennings
NatSCA Facebook/Blog Editor

Specimens gone forever

Following on the heels of Paolo’s post last week on Collections at Risk, the International Business Times reports on a collection in Iraq that is actively being destroyed. Among the irreplaceable artefacts lost was the 7th Century Assyrian winged bull – whose twin and now only survivor resides at the British Museum, London. I don’t think we can take any comfort from the fact that it’s not a Natural History collection, or assume that Natural History collections are necessarily safe from these people: they have already condemned and murdered pigeon fanciers and banned the teaching of evolution (no surprises there). For the time being we must conclude that no collection, or indeed curator, is safe – but that has probably been true for other reasons for time immemorial.