Category: Digital Museum

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Visualising the global WPY image collection – A 3D web experiment

http://static.nhm.ac.uk/wpy-globe-experiment/globe?tags= (NHM VPN required)

During lock down, I worked on a personal side project to progress my knowledge in web-based 3D interactive visualisations. I’d always been inspired by the global reach of the WPY images and the feelings they invoke when considering each image’s precious, far-flung environment and wanted to create something that helped capture that. I’d seen several impressive 3D globe and collection visualisations (e.g. https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/tsnemap/) and wanted to investigate how they implemented acceptable performance (load times and frame rate) as an online interactive collection viewer running on a range of devices, knowing enough about the web and 3D to understand the specialist approaches required.

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Lockdown introduces a new method for engaging with our collections | Curator of Micropaleontology

Nikon

2020 has been a difficult year and since March we have been working away from the collections in South Kensington. Learning new on-line communication skills has created opportunities for making our collections available to a wider audience.

Read on to find how using Microsoft Teams and a Nikon microscope we have remotely delivered access to our Micropalaeontology collections for the first time.

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Digitisation uncovers rare specimens that highlight the diversity of sex in nature| Digital Collections Programme

Digitisation enables us to understand exactly what we have in the collection. This can provide updated and accurate collection records, improve estimates for digitising future collections and occasionally uncover the unexpected.  Continue reading “Digitisation uncovers rare specimens that highlight the diversity of sex in nature| Digital Collections Programme”

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The mystery of the microfossil Christmas cards | Curator of Micropaleontology

At this time of year our famous microfossil Christmas card slides always get a lot of attention. An article in Smithsonian Magazine this week followed a very popular Tweet in early December and perhaps the most famous of the slides is about to be displayed in Museum’s Touring Treasures exhibition in Bahrain in early 2019.

Christmas card slide
Arthur Earland foraminiferal Christmas card slide sent to Edward Heron-Allen in 1921.

This year, three additional Christmas greeting slides were added to our collection as part of an exceptionally generous donation by the Quekett Microscopical Club. They returned Arthur Earland’s foraminiferal collection to its place alongside long term collaborator Edward Heron-Allen’s collection at the Museum by purchasing the collection from the estate of Brian Davidson and donating it to the Museum.

Read on to find out why most of this new acquisition can be considered upside-down, contains more evidence of the two scientists falling out and the mystery of the three “new” Christmas greeting slides.

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Borderless Collections – Starting a Collections Community (R)evolution | Digital Collections Programme

1) bristol museum

The Museum’s Digital Collections Programme (DCP) was represented at a recent John Ellerman funded Strategy Workshop for UK collections at M Shed in Bristol. The event, coordinated by Isla Gladstone of Bristol City Council Culture Team, brought together a range professionals from across UK museums and related sectors including the UK biological recording community, policy specialists, the BBC Natural History unit and informaticians to discuss the development of a coordinated approach to digitising UK regional museum collections. Continue reading “Borderless Collections – Starting a Collections Community (R)evolution | Digital Collections Programme”

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The Miniature Lives Magnified project is now complete!

A very big thank-you to the 1,000-plus in-house Visiteers and online Volunteers who helped us to extract research data from over 6,000 microscope slides of the world’s smallest insects – the chalcid parasitoid wasps. The Miniature Lives Magnified project is now closed, but you can still take part in our Digital Collections Programme by helping us with our microscope slides of Foraminifera in Miniature Fossils Magnified.

Over the course of the summer we will be processing the chalcid collection’s specimen label data that was transcribed by our digital volunteers. It will become available on the Museum’s Data Portal for anyone in the world to study.

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Digital butterfly data takes flight | Digital Collections Programme

The Museum’s entire collection of  181,545 British and Irish butterflies are now in a digital form and available for all to see online in the Museum’s Data Portal.

Photo from overhead of the drawer containing 9 columns of brightly coloured butterflies with their accompanying QR code labels.
A specimen drawer of common clouded yellow butterflies (Colias croceus). The new barcodes created as part of the Museum’s iCollections digitisation project are visible.

Each butterfly has a new digital image and digital record of the specimen’s collector, place and date of collection and this data are already being used to work out the effects of climate change on UK butterflies.

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Digitisation futures in Berlin | Digital Collections

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections

31st Annual Meeting June 20-25 2016, Berlin

Report by Ben Price and Douglas Russell

Museum collections are rapidly evolving in response to new research questions, innovations in digitisation and molecular analysis, and major challenges for society.  It’s essential that museums work together to ensure that new ideas are exchanged and collaboration strengthened to make development more rapid and effective.

 

Photo showing the spirit collection at the Berlin museum - shelves of sealed specimen jars with fish and other animals preserved within
Fluid-preserved collections in the Berlin natural history museum

The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) is an international society whose mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to society. The annual conference is one of the largest gatherings of museum professionals each year and it gives us museum and conservation folk an excellent opportunity to network and share the latest cutting-edge knowledge in our field.

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Bringing fossils into the digital age | Digital Collections

What do an Iguanodon’s thumb spike, an ichthyosaur paddle and a shark fin spine all have in common? Well these are just some of the specimens we’ve digitised as part of the museum’s eMesozoic project, headed by Fossil Mammal Curator Dr Pip Brewer.

Hypsilophodon foxii,
An Early Cretaceous dinosaur Hypsilophodon foxii, from Brightstone Bay Isle of Wight, one of the images taken as part of the eMesozoic project.

For the past eight months myself and two other eMesozoic digitisers, Lyndsey Douglas and David Godfrey, have been busy in the palaeontology department mass imaging British Mesozoic vertebrates for the first time.

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Digital Collections: the Cisco Pitstop | Digital Museum

We have a massive digital challenge. How do we transform museum collections of millions of diverse specimens, each with complex information in many forms, into digital resources – images and data – to be used by modern science and shared across the world?

Microscope slide with a stonefly
Butterflies with QR codes

The collections have been at the centre of scientific knowledge for 300 years – how do we take them into science’s future? In the words of Rod Page from Glasgow University: how do we transform a 19th Century technology into a 21st Century technology? This is the question we have been looking at in a Cisco Pitstop at the London Digital Catapult Centre over two days in February 2016.

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