Why georeferencing is the most important thing for the Museum since sliced bread | Digital Collections Programme

The ‘spatial wealth’ of the Museum’s collections is often ignored or at best under-appreciated. Most specimens if not all have a spatial locality associated with them, either written on to a label, written in a notebook, or on the specimen.

Close crop of a photo of a drawer of pinned clouded yellow butterflies with QR code and hand written labels visible
Digitising the Museum’s collections will let us unlock and share a treasure trove of information about our 80 million specimens

These localities can vary between very precise (e.g. a GPS-based latitude/longitude), very imprecise (e.g. ‘South America’) or, most likely, somewhere in-between. Most specimens within the Museum do not have a latitude and longitude, but do have detailed locality information on the accompanying label, which can be used to define co-ordinates for that specimen. So what is georeferencing, why do we need it, and how do we use it?

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Mary Anning: the unlikeliest pioneer of palaeontology | Shop at the Museum

Mary Anning was born in 1799 to a family of poor dissenters. Despite living in a time when women were not readily recognized for their scientific contribution, Anning made an incredible discovery that led to her becoming one of the most important names in palaeontology. On the 216th anniversary of her birthday, the Museum’s online shop takes a look at her life and work and how it is still influencing scientists today.

Our gallery character 'Mary' regularly talks in front some of her own fossils
Our gallery character ‘Mary’ regularly talks in front some of her own fossils

Anning was not meant for the scientific field. She was the wrong sex, class, religion, and she was even almost killed when she was struck by lightning as a baby. However, she was clearly a born survivor as she and her brother Joseph were the only children to survive out of ten siblings. It was her cabinet-maker father, Richard, that taught Mary how to find and clean up the fossils they found on the Lyme Regis coast. They sold their ‘curiosities’ along the seafront, possibly inspiring the tongue twister, ‘She sells seashells on the seashore’.

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Find our older blog posts | Natural History Museum

We’ve moved to WordPress so welcome to the new blog from the Natural History Museum in London. If you’ve already been following our bloggers over the years, you can still find their older posts in our archive at nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/blogs

If you’re new to the Museum’s blogs, read on to see what happens behind-the-scenes at the Museum and out in the field, in posts carefully crafted by our curators and researchers, librarians, volunteers and staff. Enjoy!