scholarly journals The Value of Digitising Natural History Collections

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danail Popov ◽  
Priyanka Roychoudhury ◽  
Helen Hardy ◽  
Laurence Livermore ◽  
Ken Norris
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Return On Investment ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Returns On Investment ◽  
A Current

The Natural History Museum, London has been creating digital data about collections for many years, with a formal Digital Collections Programme since 2014. Efforts to monitor the outcomes and impact of this work have focused on metrics of digital access, such as download events, and on citations of digital specimens as a measure of use. Digitisation projects and resulting research have also been used as impact case studies, highlighting areas such as human health and conservation. In 2021, the Museum decided to explore the economic impacts of collections data in more depth, and commissioned Frontier Economics to undertake modelling, resulting in this report. While the methods in this report are relevant to collections globally, this modelling focuses on benefits to the UK, and is intended to support the Museum’s own digitisation work, as well as a current scoping study funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council about the case for digitising all UK natural science collections as a research infrastructure. This study focuses on digitisation in the round, not distinguishing between different collection types or levels of data creation at this stage. Three methods have been used: first, analysing five key thematic areas or sectors where data from natural science collections are likely to lead to benefits; secondly, analysing typical returns on investment in scientific research; and thirdly, examining the efficiency savings that can be reinvested in research if data are available freely and openly. Together, these methods confirm benefits in excess of £2 billion over 30 years, representing a seven to ten times return on investment.

Ralph Tate, his Natural History Museum at the University of Adelaide and the ‘Tate Museum'

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kidman
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The University

Many of Ralph Tate's achievements as the University of Adelaide's foundation Professor of Natural Science arewell known.The focus here is on the quite remarkable, but almost forgotten, natural history museum that he built at the University and that after his death was named the Tate Museum. The paper outlines and explains the difficulties that Tate encountered in establishing the museum, the strictly geological focus of his successors and the gradual dispersal of Tate's main collections.

scholarly journals Museums - from local to global

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
pp. A01
Author(s):  
Matteo Bisanti
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Local Dimension ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Global Science ◽  
Evaluation Exercise

Should one aim at presenting a local or global science perspective in construing an effective museum narration for communicating scientific and technological issues in natural science? This article will attempt to respond to this question by presenting the data of an evaluation exercise undertaken by the Trento Natural History Museum (Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali – MTSN) from 2009 to 2011. The local dimension apparently lies at the heart of the museum’s appeal for its visitors: they associate their mountain surroundings with the symbol of the region’s identity, and appreciate in particular the efforts undertaken by the museum to communicate and conserve the mountain’s environment. Indeed, in their opinion, by protecting the mountains and disseminating knowledge about them, the museum indirectly acts as a custodian of the region’s own identity. However, interest in local issues far from rules out global scientific themes, whose presence is sought to complement and interact with the local discourse.

scholarly journals Professional fossil preparators at the British Museum (Natural History), 1843–1990

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-264
Author(s):  
Mark R. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Public Display ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Fossil Material ◽  
Mechanical Preparation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Public Exhibition ◽  
Father And Son

Since the inception of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1881 (now the Natural History Museum, London), the collection, development and mounting of fossils for scientific study and public exhibition have been undertaken by fossil preparators. Originally known as masons, because of their rock-working skills, their roles expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when, at the forefront of the developing science of palaeontology, the Museum was actively obtaining fossil material from the UK and abroad to build the collections. As greater numbers of more impressive specimens were put on public display, these preparators developed new and better methods to recover and transport fossils from the field, and technical improvements, in the form of powered tools, enabled more detailed mechanical preparation to be undertaken. A recurring theme in the history of palaeontological preparation has been that sons often followed in their fathers' footsteps in earth sciences. William and Thomas Davies, Caleb and Frank Barlow, and Louis and Robert Parsons were all father-and-son geologists and preparators.

scholarly journals Engaging K-12 Audiences with Biodiversity Data through Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26473
Author(s):  
Molly Phillips ◽  
Anne Basham ◽  
Marc Cubeta ◽  
Kari Harris ◽  
Jonathan Hendricks ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Science Standards ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
K 12

Natural history collections around the world are currently being digitized with the resulting data and associated media now shared online in aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio). These collections and their resources are accessible and discoverable through online portals to not only researchers and collections professionals, but to educators, students, and other potential downstream users. Primary and secondary education (K-12) in the United States is going through its own revolution with many states adopting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS https://www.nextgenscience.org/). The new standards emphasize science practices for analyzing and interpreting data and connect to cross-cutting concepts such as cause and effect and patterns. NGSS and natural history collections data portals seem to complement each other. Nevertheless, many educators and students are unaware of the digital resources available or are overwhelmed with working in aggregated databases created by scientists. To better address this challenge, participants within the National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC) have been working to increase awareness of, and scaffold learning for, digitized collections with K-12 educators and learners. They are accomplishing this through individual programs at institutions across the country as part of the Thematic Collections Networks and collaboratively through the iDigBio Education and Outreach Working Group. ADBC partners have focused on incorporating digital data and resources into K-12 classrooms through training workshops and webinars for both educators and collections professionals, as well as through creating educational resources, websites, and applications that use digital collections data. This presentation includes lessons learned from engaging K-12 audiences with digital data, summarizes available resources for both educators and collections professionals, shares how to become involved, and provides ways to facilitate transfer of educational resources to the K-12 community.

scholarly journals High-Throughput Digitisation of Natural History Specimens

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Louise Allan ◽  
Steen Dupont ◽  
Helen Hardy ◽  
Laurence Livermore ◽  
Benjamin Price ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
Human Error ◽  
Data Matrix ◽  
Post Processing ◽  
Unique Identifier ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Specimen Handling ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Microscope Slides

The Natural History Museum, London (NHM) has embarked on an ambitious Digital Collections Programme to digitise its collections. One aim of the programme has been to improve the workflows and infrastructure needed to support high-throughput digitisation and create comprehensive digital inventories of large scientific collections. Pilot projects have been carried out for a variety of collection types, from which high-throughput imaging workflows have been developed and refined. These workflows have focused on pinned insect specimens (Blagoderov et al. 2012, Paterson et al. 2016, Blagoderov et al. 2017, Price et al. 2018), microscope slides (whole slide and specimen imaging; Allan et al. 2018, Allan et al. 2019) and herbarium sheets. The rate and time taken to digitise specimens is influenced by a number of factors that include, among others, the level of preparation and post-processing required, imaging approach, the type of specimens as well as the complexity and condition of the collection. As part of this presentation we will include information on the rate, cost and time to digitise various NHM collections, illustrating how our processes have improved digitisation efficiency and allowed us to maintain quality. The programme has run a variety of digitisation projects, gathering data about rates of digitisation (preparation, imaging, transcription etc.) and developing improvements. Collection types such as microscope slides and herbarium sheets lend themselves to higher imaging rates, while other collections such as pinned insects, which require greater amounts of specimen handling to remove labels, tend to have lower imaging rates (Fig. 1). In order to increase efficiency, we have developed approaches that minimise specimen handling. For example, workflows for pinned insects such as the Angled Label Image Capture and Extraction (ALICE) do not require the removal of specimen labels from the pin as the system can capture angled images of the labels, thus increasing the imaging rate three-fold (Fig. 1). Another approach taken is to semi-automate mass digitisation using a combination of temporary and permanent Data Matrix barcode labels (Allan et al. 2019). By using multiple barcodes at the imaging stage to encode information associated with each specimen (i.e. unique identifier, location in the collection, taxonomic name, type status etc.; Fig. 2), we can run a series of automated processes, including file renaming, image processing and bulk import into the Museum’s collection management system. Through adaptation of our workflows with this new approach we have increased the efficiency of digitisation processes, illustrating how simple activities, like automated file renaming, reduces image post-processing time, minimises human error and can be applied across multiple collection types.

Our beautiful world: art at the Natural History Museum, London

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-21
Author(s):  
Ann Datta
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
Commercial Exploitation ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk

Behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum is the world’s largest natural history library, with approximately one million printed books. But the crown jewels are the Library’s art collections, depicting rocks, minerals, fossils, plants and animals, and dating from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Its more than half a million individual items make this the largest collection of natural history art not only in the UK but in the world. Commercial exploitation of the collection has mostly been by publishers of books and journals, but others have seen opportunities for writing books about the illustrations, putting the art in exhibitions, printing the images on decorative items, and other marketing ventures. In 2003 the Library launched a website designed to promote the art collections further and make them accessible to a global audience.

Unlock imagined: arts in criminal justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Alison Frater
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Personal Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Optimistic Picture ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Causes Of Crime

Starting with a personal perspective this piece outlines the place and role of the arts in the criminal justice system in the UK. It paints an optimistic picture, though an unsettling one, because the imagination and reflexiveness of the arts reveals a great deal about the causes of crime and the consequences of incarceration. It raises questions about the transforming impact of the arts: how the benefits could, and should, be optimised and why evaluations of arts interventions are consistent in identifying the need for a non-coercive, more socially focused, paradigm for rehabilitation. It concludes that the deeper the arts are embedded in the criminal justice system the greater the benefits will be, that a more interdisciplinary approach would support better theoretical understanding, and that increased capacity to deliver arts in the criminal justice system is needed to offer more people a creative pathway out of crime.

Edward Heron-Allen FRS (1861–1943): a review of his scientific career, with an annotated bibliography of his foraminiferal publications

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Hodgkinson ◽  
John E. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Scientific Career ◽  
History Museum ◽  
First Time

ABSTRACT: In spite of his many other interests, Edward Heron-Allen also worked for nearly 50 years as a scientist on minute shelled protists, called foraminifera, much of it in an unpaid, unofficial capacity at The Natural History Museum, London, and notably in collaboration with Arthur Earland. During this career he published more than 70 papers and obtained several fellowships, culminating in 1919 in his election to the Royal Society. Subsequently, he bequeathed his foraminiferal collections and fine library to the Museum, and both are housed today in a room named in his honour. In this paper, for the first time, an assessment of his scientific accomplishments is given, together with a full annotated bibliography of his publications held in the Heron-Allen Library. This is part of a project to produce a bibliography of his complete publications, recently initiated by the Heron-Allen Society.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document