Tag Archives for practice

“Our Irish Natural History”: Increasing the Accessibility of Natural History Collections through Community-Driven Interpretation

Written by Adriana Ballinger, Yale University Charles P. Howland Postgraduate Research Fellow at the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History.

Natural history specimens are often inaccessible to the communities from which they were collected. As a result, source communities lack opportunities to connect with elements of their local heritage, and museums and their publics overlook the place-based expertise that many of these communities hold about the specimens we research and see on display. Scientists lead the knowledge creation process surrounding natural history specimens, but source communities can also contribute valuable information, especially regarding the meanings that flora, fauna, and geological features embody in their environments of origin. Although these cultural contexts are often intangible and unquantifiable, they are nevertheless important facets of specimens’ natural histories. For the past year, I have led “Our Irish Natural History,” a community-driven research and exhibition project at the National Museum of Ireland (NMI). I set out to increase the accessibility of the NMI’s natural history collections, explore innovative avenues for community-led interpretation, and create new opportunities for public engagement.

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How to Get a Job Working with Museum Collections

Written by Sarah Burhouse, Caitlin Jamison, Bethany Palumbo & Vicky Ward. Compiled by Jennifer Gallichan, Vertebrate Curator, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

Those of us that that are lucky enough to work with natural science collections will be familiar with the question ‘How do you get a job in a museum’? At a time when cuts to the sector mean that museum jobs seem even fewer and farther between, I felt it was important that we share some of our combined experiences to hopefully give some tips (and hope) for emerging museum professionals.

I reached out to colleagues across the sector to get their ‘origin’ stories and see if they had any advice for those seeking a museum job working with collections. Many thanks to Sarah, Caitlin, Bethany and Vicky for sharing your stories with us.

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From Deck to Decant: A Marine Biologist’s Déjà Vu After a Year in a Natural History Museum

Written by Dr Jamie Maxwell, Collections Assistant, National Museum of Ireland, Natural History.

Not every job takes you to a windswept beach on Ireland’s west coast to recover the head of a stranded True’s beaked whale calf. But then again, my past year as a Collections Assistant at the Natural History Museum in Dublin has been anything but ordinary. As we collected the head of the slightly decomposed whale calf, I was reminded of my previous fieldwork experiences, mainly on research cruises during my academic career. Before joining the museum, I spent a decade in education and research as a marine biologist, specializing in deep-sea invertebrates. During that time, I not only investigated freshly collected specimens but also engaged with museum collections. It wasn’t until I became a collections assistant at the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History that I became fully immersed in the day-to-day workings of a museum. Much of the past year was taken up with decanting the contents of the Merrion Street building in preparation for renovation. In this blog, I’ll explore how decanting a museum is remarkably like being involved with a research cruise. 

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Seeing With Their Eyes A Poetic Reflection on the 2025 ‘From Collections to Connections’ NatSCA Conference Presentation

Written by Pauline Rutter – Independent Archival Artist, Community and Organisation Poet.

These words look out from the page with eyes I have borrowed. Eyes not shaped for vision through the specific disciplinary scientific lens. Eyes that strain to see beyond past centuries of debate on what, of all origins, is knowable and what is not. With these original eyes, would ways of seeing allow the light to travel outwards resisting funnelled perspectives and interpretations descended from imperialistic systems of Enlightenment science, colonial ideologies and narratives? In this context my eyes had opened up unevolved or re-evolved with lepidopteran vision, though not removed from all that had been taught to be seen. New eyes with sight of intensified colour that amplified nature’s interconnecting patterns, only visible outside the spectrum of the everyday, the expected, the predetermined. 

What use is butterfly sight that transforms configured objects and living matter with or without full binominal species names, into fragments like those of the intertwined and metamorphosed elements in ritualistic rapture spreading out across a Wangechi Mutu collage? 

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How to Foster Empathy with Endangered Animals: Developing a Creative Writing and Drawing Workshop Toolkit

Written by Dr Christina Thatcher, Lecturer in Creative Writing & Dr Lisa El Refaie, Reader in Language and Communication, Cardiff University.

With biodiversity declining at an alarming rate, we need to find ways of encouraging people to care about all endangered animal species, not just the ones with the most obvious appeal, such as pandas and polar bears, for example. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s ‘Red List of Threatened Species’, 27% of mammals are threatened with extinction, but so are 44% of reef corals, 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 21% of reptiles, and 12% of birds.

In 2023, we—Dr Christina Thatcher and Dr Lisa El Refaie from Cardiff University—met and discovered our shared interest in the expressive arts, metaphor, empathy and nature. We then designed a project which aimed to use the power of creativity to increase public awareness of, and empathy for, endangered animals, focusing on species that have few or no obvious human-like features. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account and ran from November 2023 until the autumn 2024, in collaboration with Natural History curators at the National Museum Cardiff. Continue reading →