Tag Archives for practice

NatSCA Digital Digest – April 2025

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

New Unnatural History Museum Sessions

The Unnatural History Museum 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.

Links to upcoming sessions can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/o/verity-burke-53923741293 and will continue to be updated as more events are added.

The event series now has a website where recordings of prior sessions will be uploaded and you can check out upcoming events: https://unnaturalhistorymuseum.org/

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Packing the Blaschka Glass Models 

Written by Julian Carter, Principal Conservator Natural Sciences, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Cardiff

During the late 19th century, Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1929) produced thousands of beautifully detailed glass models of a wide range of sea creatures, and other animals, for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world. The work has since been hailed as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art”. The work of the Blaschka’s remains remarkably contemporary today, working as they did on the cusp of design, craft, and industry. Crossing the boundaries of science and art, the surviving models today have a value that makes them irreplaceable. 

The idea for making lifelike renditions of sea creatures out of glass arose from the difficulty of preserving and displaying soft-bodied animals such as jellyfish, marine worms, and sea anemones. Preserving such animals in a lifelike way is difficult as techniques such as fluid preservation cause colours to quickly fade and shapes to become distorted. Leopold Blaschka devised a solution to this problem by using his glass working skills to accurately model these animals out of glass and other materials available to him and went on to establish a successful business supplying glass models to museums worldwide during the latter half of the 19th century. 

The model of the sea anemone Actinia mesembryanthum (right) based on a plate (left) from Phillip Henry Gosse’s Actinologia britannica. A history of the British sea-anemones and corals which Leopold Blaschka used for the early sea anemone models that he built.
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65 Million Years in the Making, Five Seconds to Explain

Written by Callum Smart, a natural history volunteer at Bolton Museum. He works both in the stores, documenting the collections, and in the gallery engaging with visitors using the objects to start conversations. Here he shares his experience of one afternoon with a school group.

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Bolton Museum and I have just finished setting up the fossil touch tray, a selection of ancient artefacts for visitors to get hands on with. A school trip marches through the atrium, passing the gift shop with furtive glances, heading towards the wonderful Egyptian exhibits. The children clutch their worksheets, a scavenger hunt checklist filled with items from around the museum’s galleries. They whisper to each other, checking if they’ve missed anything in the Bolton’s History gallery and making bold claims over what they’ll find in the next room.

Callum at the object handling table with the fossil touch tray speaking to visitors. © Bolton Museum

A few of them spot the fossils on my trolley and start to stop, blurting out questions, weighing up whether to reach out and touch the strange rocks. I’d love for kids to interact with the fossils, it’s why I’m there. But I also don’t want to distract them from their trip, so I’m grateful when the teacher steers them on. Their teacher asks if I would be able to talk to the children about the fossils when they finish in the Egypt gallery. “Of course,” I say, “I’d be happy to.”

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Top NatSCA Blogs of 2024

Compiled by Jen Gallichan, NatSCA Blog Editor.

2024 was a great year for the NatSCA blog and we have seen increases in both the number of readers and number of articles submitted. We are now reaching well over 2000 views per month. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed an article. The NatSCA blog is driven solely by your contributions, and it is stands as a testament to all the hard work you are doing. I am pleased to say that the 2025 blog calendar is open for business, so drop me a line if you would like to contribute!

To celebrate all your wonderfulness, I am taking this opportunity to highlight the top 10 most read posts from 2024. This year’s line-up feels more diverse that ever, featuring a coelacanth, live dissections, radiocarbon dating, and fluid collections!

In descending order…

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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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