Tag Archives for NatSCA Conference

NatSCA Digital Digest – January 2025

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Welcome to the January edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to the first Digital Digest of 2025.

Digital Digest is 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

First, we have a few conference deadline reminders for the start of the year:

NatSCA Conference & AGM 2025

The 2025 NatSCA conference Call for Papers is closing soon! The deadline to submit is 5pm GMT Friday 17th January. Get in touch with the committee with any questions (conference@natsca.org). We look forward to reading your submissions!

Making a Difference: Showing the Positive Impact of Natural History Collections

The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 8th and Friday 9th May 2025 at The University of Manchester, Manchester Museum.

Natural history collections are involved in a huge range of work that has enormous positive impacts on people and the planet – this is a conference to share these stories. The #NatSCA2025 conference invites proposals for presentations looking at impact, how our work is making a difference, how we measure it, how we show success, and how we advocate for collections.

We seek ideas from the natural history collections community, educators, collaborators, and beyond. We are interested in practical lessons, unique solutions, new collaborations, and to show what has and hasn’t worked. We are particularly looking for presentations that share the differences museums are making in:

  • facing global challenges such as the biodiversity and climate crises, and environmental issues
  • improving people’s lives
  • changing laws
  • social justice, restitution, and decolonisation
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NatSCA Digital Digest – April 2024

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Welcome to the April 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

Not long now until the 2024 Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association. Trials and Triumphs: sharing practice across the museum sector will be held next week, 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. 

Find more information, and the programme of talks and events on the event page here.

The Unnatural History Museum

The Unnatural History Museum series of talks brings together museum professionals, creatives and academics across disciplines to platform vital conversations about the museum mediation of the natural world during the sixth mass extinction.

The series unfolds over a series of themed Zoom sessions featuring short presentations, followed by a roundtable discussion. The third session, on “Deep Time”, will feature papers from and discussion with Diana Marsh (University of Maryland), Richard Fallon (Natural History Museum, London), and Shana van Hauwermeiren (Workshop Intangible Heritage).

The talk will be later this month, on Wednesday 24th April at 5pm Irish Standard Time.

Registration is free and more information can be found on the Eventbrite page here.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – January 2024

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Assistant Curator of Entomology, National Museums Scotland.

Welcome to the January edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all our readers!

Digital Digest is 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 2024 – Submission Reminder

There’s still time to submit for the 2024 NatSCA Annual Conference! The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th April 2024, in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Papers can be presented in any of several formats: A 20-minute presentation (consisting of a 15-minute talk followed by 5 minutes of Q&A) or a 5-minute lightning talk. Talks can be presented in person or by submission of a pre-recorded presentation, with the option of an in-person or live stream Q&A (via Zoom).

Deadline for submission: 5pm GMT Friday 19th January. More info and submission forms here.

Museums and Galleries History Group 2024 Symposium

A one-day symposium held at the University of Leeds and online. Microhistory aims to direct attention towards marginal(ized) voices and perspectives and emphasizes the agency of the ‘ordinary’. This symposium will explore the relationships between large historical narratives and individual case studies and their use in disrupting established grand historical narratives, countering oversimplification.

The symposium will be held on January 26th. More information and registration here.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – April 2023

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Assistant Curator of Entomology for National Museums Scotland.

Welcome to the April 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 for the NatSCA 2023 conference closes on April 20th so get booking ASAP. The conference will be held on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th April 2023. Stoke-on-Trent Museums will be hosting the conference at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. The conference will include gallery and collection tours, presentations, poster sessions and the annual AGM. For all the info and to register, check out our webpage.

Register via Eventbrite through the NatSCA website: https://www.natsca.org/natsca2023. Members can access discounted booking rates by entering a promo code which has been distributed. If you are a NatSCA member and have not received a code via email, please contact membership@natsca.org. We look forward to seeing you later this month!

SPNHC Conference

The 38th Annual Meeting of The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is being held in San Francisco, California 28 May – 2 June 2023. Early bird registration ends this Friday 15th April. See details and registration here.

Science, Gender & Sociability in a Northern City c. 1775-1820 Conference

This interdisciplinary event brings together scholars in women’s history, the history of science, literature, theatrical performance, music and historical archaeology from across the UK and the US, to contextualise and analyse the diary of Jane Ewbank (1778‒1824). More information on speakers, and links for bookings, can be found here. The conference runs Thursday 8th to 10th June 2023.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – February 2023

Compiled by Glenn Roadley, NatSCA Committee Member, Curator of Natural Science at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.

Welcome to the February 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 Conference

The NatSCA annual conference and AGM will be held at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th April 2023. The focus this year is:

So how do we actually do all this? Hopeful futures and turning theory into practice for big issues in natural history collections.

This is the “How To…” conference for people working with natural history collections. The last few years have seen unprecedented changes in the expectations for what the museum sector can deliver. Global and local social and environmental issues have coincided to reinforce the needs of museums to consider their reinvention and relevance. Booking will open shortly, so keep an eye on our website and social media channels for updates.

SPNHC Conference

The 38th Annual Meeting of The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is being held in San Francisco, California 28 May – 2 June 2023. Full details here.

DiSSCo UK Community Event

The next DiSSCo UK event will be held on March 3rd, 14:30-16:30 via Microsoft Teams. Please save this date in your calendars! A general update on DiSSCo UK activities and future plans will be provided, and we will hear from our colleagues at Kew regarding their digitisation project, and will discuss the affiliation between natural science collections and the humanities sector. For details, contact Tara Wainwright (tara.wainwright@nhm.ac.uk)

Bursaries for People and Plants workshop 2 at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Friday March 10th 2023)

Applications are now open for 4 funded spaces at workshop 2 of the AHRC funded project ‘People and Plants: reactivating ethnobotanical collections as material archives of Indigenous ecological knowledge’.

Four bursaries of up to £225 each are available. This sum may be set against your travel costs or accommodation costs.

Conditions:

  • Only members of the Natural Science Collections Association and the Museum Ethnographers Group can apply for a bursary.
  • All successful applicants must provide a write up for the NatSCA or MEG blog.
  • Due the funds available, applications are limited to UK residents only.
  • Bursaries are only open to individual members.

To apply for a bursary please write no more than 500 words on how the workshop would be useful for your own personal or professional development, how this fits with your interests and what you might bring to the discussion.

Preference will be given to those lacking institutional support to attend workshops, early career museum professionals and students.

All bursaries are given at the discretion of the project team and the NatSCA and MEG committee. Applicants will be notified by February 20th if they have been successful and travel and accommodation will be booked by the project.

Applications should be sent to: Ali Clark a.clark@nms.ac.uk by Friday February 17th at 5pm.

Details of the workshop: March 10th Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

This workshop will be run in partnership with the Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London and Museu Goeldi, Brazil. Discussions will be centred around the ecological value of ethnobotanical collections, including a focus on the interaction of western botanical nomenclature and traditional knowledge which forms the basis of an existing British Academy Knowledge Frontiers project. The Richard Spruce collection (1849-1864) will be the basis of a case study for how culture, plants and environment in the northwest Amazon have changed over the last 160 years.

Speakers include: Luciana Martins (Birkbeck), Dagoberto Lima Azevedo (Tukano Indigenous Researcher), Claudia-Leonor Lopez Garces (Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi) and Cinthya Lana (University of Gothenburg)

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