Tag Archives for practice

The Herbarium Handbook – Sharing Best Practice from Across the Globe.

Submitted by Clare Drinkell, Senior Curator Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Editors: Nina Davies, Clare Drinkell, Timothy Utteridge. 290 pp, 234 x 156 mm. Over 700 colour photographs. Paperback, ISBN 9781842467695. Kew Publishing, TW9 3AE, UK 2023. £25.00. https://shop.kew.org/kew-herbarium-handbook

Cover page of The Herbarium Handbook

The new Herbarium Handbook is a key new addition to Kew Publishing’s series of handbooks, including The Plant Glossary and The Temperate Plant Families Identification Handbook. Unlike the other books in the series the Herbarium Handbook is a new version of a book first compiled and edited by Kew botanists some thirty-four years ago. The initial Herbarium Handbook came about following an extremely popular International Diploma Course in Herbarium Techniques at Kew. The demand to attend the course was so high that the number of applicants far exceeded places on the course. In view of the interest, the main information imparted during the course was published as a manual, widely recognised as an important reference for fundamental aspects of herbarium care and management.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – November 2023

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

Welcome to the November 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 AGM and seminar – Building bridges between collectors and museums

The Geological Curators Group will be holding their annual AGM and seminar on November 28th – topics will include:

  • Many important specimens are held in private collections. How can museums gain an understanding of the scope of these collections and the needs of collectors?
  • How can museums gain the trust of collectors and start to find ways to work around the sometimes strict conditions imposed upon them?
  • How do collectors feel that museums can improve the way that they deal with such donations?
  • Lack of ‘proof of legal ownership’ or ‘documentation of permission to collect’ can be major sticking points for museums; however, such provenance was rarely required or given historically (or even more recently). How can we ensure that important historic specimens can be integrated into museum collections? Do we need a more flexible approach to the ‘ownership’ of geological specimens collected from casual sites that are not SSSI’s or other protected statuses?
  • What can we learn from previous experiences?
  • Can museums produce advice to help private collectors to document their collections and highlight or label specimens that might ideally end up in a museum in the future?

For more information and to register, see the GCG website: https://www.geocurator.org/events/162-50th-annual-general-meeting-and-winter-seminar

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How Do You Do Decolonial Research in Natural History Museums?

Written by Jack Ashby, Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.

Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe’s paper, Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Natural History Collections (2018) acted as a wake-up call to our sector, effectively founding a discipline in natural history museums. In the five years since, a lot of work has begun to address the colonial legacies underpinning collections of animals, plants, fungi and rocks.[i] The principal aims of this work include telling more honest stories about the different kinds of injustice involved in the acquisition of collections; and addressing the fact that our museums have long been prioritising narratives elevating white individuals over everyone else. In doing so, it is hoped that a greater diversity of people will feel represented by our museums, thereby enhancing the relevance of the collections.

Natural history collections dwarf those of any other museum discipline, and unlike sectors which have been thinking about this for decades, the practices underpinning their creation have not traditionally prioritised recording associated cultural or social histories. Like others who felt inspired by Subhadra and Miranda’s call to action, faced with contemplating how to begin to unpick the stories hidden behind literally millions of ‘scientific’ specimens, it was fundamental to consider the question, where do you start with decolonial research in natural history museums? Obviously, there is no one answer, but I thought it could be helpful to list a few possible approaches. One underlying element is to recognise how colonialism and its framings have shaped the way that events took place – from major historical moments to minute individual acts – and how the stories about these events have been told.

Below is a list of possible starting points for research, with examples of what that could look like in practice (in reality most of these overlap). For me, each has something to say about the entwined human and environmental costs of the colonial project – questions that natural history museums are uniquely placed to address.

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What is Taxidermy? An Intimate Relationship between Death and Maker.  

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

For taxidermy to exist an animal must have died. This brutal truth creates unease and leaves the viewer to ponder how the death occurred. And secondly how the death and the body is managed. A fluffy rabbit, cute and cuddly in life, suddenly becomes hideous and untouchable in death. Due to my profession, I am raising a child who has been exposed to dead animals and the concept of death his whole life. This has not made him desensitised to death, I’d say the opposite. He is deeply hurt by the death of any animal; he is a self-proclaimed vegetarian and last week at the age of 4 he asked me if his job when he grows up could be to stop people eating animals. He shouts at cars to slow down in case they hit anything and one of my favourite things he asks me when we meet new people is if they are a vegetarian or a carnivore eyeing them up suspiciously. Does a good understanding of death at a young age give a person greater empathy for animals and take us closer to not seeing them as ‘other’? 

When my son is asked what a taxidermist does, he says they look after animals when they die. I get at least one phone call a week from someone mourning their dead pet, I give advice on what to do next, ideas for memorials and how to store the body in the freezer while they decide what to do. I didn’t expect as a taxidermist to be a councillor, a listening ear, someone who is qualified to talk about death. 

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