Tag Archives for World Museum Liverpool

Discovering Treasures in the Depths of the Dagnall.

Written by Ruth Cowlishaw of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

This year marks Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s 125th anniversary. The school was the first institute of its kind back in 1898, built to help investigate some of the tropical diseases brought back to the busy port city from shipping expeditions and trade. To celebrate such a major milestone an array of events and activities have been planned by the school, including outreach events and fundraising, whilst also giving us a chance to reflect on our history. One such planned scheme was the distribution of internal funds for exciting projects, proposed by staff members that would make a difference in this very special year.

Mary Kingsley Building, LSTM. ©LSTM

The Dagnall Laboratory situated in the Mary Kingsley Building is the main teaching laboratory for the school. Within its walls it houses many historical pathological and entomological samples, from mosquito wings and blood films to seven-meter-long tapeworms. Throughout the years a selection of these samples has been used to help educate thousands of medical professionals, postgraduate students and armed forces personnel. However, a large part of the collection became forgotten and neglected as specimen preservation skills and staff were lost over time. With news of potential funding myself and the team saw an opportunity to rediscover these “lost” specimens and decided to put together a bid with the aim to reinvigorate our collection. The project not only aligned with the 125 Anniversary theme of Heritage and History but also looked forward to the future.

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How to Find Ectoparasites on Study Skins and Explore Natural Heritage Shared between Colonial and Provincial Museums

Written by John-James Wilson, Lead Curator of Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool & Jing Jing Khoo, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Institute of Infection, Veterinary & Ecological Sciences, University of Liverpool.

Selangor Museum was established in Kuala Lumpur by British colonial officials in 1887. A purpose-built museum building, opened in 1907, was designed by Liverpool-born architect Arthur Hubback, but there is a stronger link between Selangor Museum and Liverpool.

Selangor Museum’s early director Herbert Robinson was also born in Liverpool and had worked as an assistant at the Liverpool Museums, now known as World Museum. Selangor Museum wasn’t a large institution, with just three British curators and three museum hunters from Sarawak, one being Charles Ulok. But through the museum’s work, a European knowledge system was imposed onto the local wildlife.

The museum’s work included extensive hunting on the hill and mountains and islands of Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. The museum soon ran out of storage space in Kuala Lumpur and specimens were routinely sent to England. Hundreds of specimens were sent to Robinson’s former workplace, World Museum, in 1914.

https://archive.org/embed/from-selangor-museum-to-liverpool

Click link above for 3-minute video about Selangor Museum and its connection to Liverpool made for the Green Representatives Network at Monash University in Selangor.

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William Thomas March, a Jamaican Collector, Naturalist and Early Pioneer of Biological Data Recording in Jamaica.

Written by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Figure 1. William Thomas March’s bird skins stored in the Vertebrate Zoology collection at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool © National Museums Liverpool (World Museum: NML-VZ T1134, NML-VZ T760, NML-VZ T5652, NML-VZ 1989.66.1279, NML-VZ T19525, NML-VZ T12817, NML-VZ T9981, NML-VZ T1128, NML-VZ T14037, NML-VZ T14031/ Olivia Beavers)

August celebrates Jamaican independence, so what better way to celebrate than to talk about a Jamaican collector from the 1800s whose contributions to understanding Jamaican biodiversity are not yet fully recognised. 

I recently finished the project stage of the Associateship of the Museum Association (AMA). My project focused on helping to tell untold stories of the collections held at World Museum. 

Through trial and error, I started to look through World Museum’s database and Google the names of collectors to see if we had collectors who had black or brown heritage – with a focus on collectors with specimens from the Caribbean. I ended up finding William Thomas March. Only two previous papers were written about him, both by Catherine Levy (Managing Director of Windsor Research Centre, former President of the Caribbean Birds, and of BirdLife Jamaica). 

To coincide with the research and my project, I created a new dataset titled ‘Bird skins from Jamaica in the collections of World Museums Liverpool’ – now available on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website. It includes specimens from William Thomas March.

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Wikipedia, Museum Volunteers And The New Normal

By John-James Wilson, Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Like most museums across the country, World Museum suspended its volunteer programmes shortly before the first national lockdown in March 2020. This was meant to be a short-term measure but with curators continuing to work hybridly our volunteers haven’t yet returned. Organisations like Volunteer Scotland have advised volunteers to consider if and how they can work remotely.

While some museums had existing remote volunteering activities (see great examples here and here), which saw increased participation, World Museum’s vertebrate zoology collection didn’t. An additional challenge for us has been that remote access to our collections database is limited to staff with a VDI. With the pandemic still with us for some time to come (Chris Whitty has said it will be 5 years) we have started exploring ways to engage both new and long-serving volunteers with the collection online.

During lockdown, Auckland Museum published a Wikimedia strategy citing the provocative 2018 talk by Adam Moriarty which championed the importance of collection information featuring, not solely on museum’s own webpages, but in places like GBIF and Wikipedia. This reinforced our view that we need to improve the collections’ presence in Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles are created by volunteers and can be edited by anyone with a standard web browser, potentially providing a valuable activity for remote volunteering.

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Stepping Into The Genomics Age: A DNA Bank at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

By John-James Wilson, Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

From World Museum’s founding collection of study skins and taxidermy mounts bequeathed by the 13th Earl of Derby to the spirit-preserved amphibians collected by curator Malcolm Largen in the 1980s, World Museum’s Vertebrate Zoology collection has continued to expand and reflect the state-of-the-art in specimen preparation and storage.

As ethics around the sacrifice of animals for science have modernised, ‘traditional’ specimen types are no longer being prepared at the same rates, and growth of the collection has slowed abruptly. At the same time usage of the collection has diversified, including increases in requests for destructive sampling. In particular, the removal of small tissue samples, usually bird toe pad scrapes, is regularly requested for use in DNA extraction which produces a ‘pure’ DNA extract that can be used in a number of genomic investigations.

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