Tag: Darwin Centre Cocoon

Posted on

How Lego lends a hand in digitising 300 year old Herbarium books | Digital Collections Programme

The Museum is on a mission to digitise 80 million specimens. We want to mobilise the collections to give the global community access to this unrivaled historical, cultural, geographical and taxonomic resource.

The Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London
The Sir Hans Sloane Herbarium in the Darwin Centre Cocoon at the Museum in London

Carrying out pilot projects helps us to establish bespoke digital capture workflows on areas of the collections. Mercers Trust funded a small scale pilot project to digitise the more difficult to image herbarium specimens from the Samuel Browne Volumes of the Sloane Herbarium that contain specimens of medicinal plants form India. Dr Steen Dupont from the Museum’s Digital Collection programme has been leading on this project. Continue reading “How Lego lends a hand in digitising 300 year old Herbarium books | Digital Collections Programme”

Posted on

Bedford Girls’ School meet Dr Anne Jungblut | The Microverse

Freya Bolton and Emily Stearn, students at Bedford Girls’ School, tell us about their experience of visiting the Museum to meet with the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity team and Dr Anne Jungblut who leads the Microverse project.

On 30 April, we (eleven International Baccalaureate students from Bedford Girls’ School) had the opportunity to come and visit the Natural History Museum, having participated in the Museum’s exciting project ‘The Microverse’. For many of us, despite the fact we’d visited many times previously, we knew this time it was going to be something slightly different, being able to explore the Museum in a new, unique and fascinating light. Having spoken to Jade Cawthray, she kindly agreed to arrange a behind the scenes tour especially for us!

Florin Feneru with a draw of specimens for identification. Photo credit: Aarti Bhogaita
So much to identify so little time. Florin Feneru with a draw of specimens for identification. Photo credit: Aarti Bhogaita

We were greeted by Lucy Robinson, who explained to us, as we travelled through the Museum, that within there were over 80 million different plant, animal, fossil and mineral specimens. After this, we were introduced to Dr Florin Feneru at the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity, who confessed that he would receive specimens sent in from thousands of people each year, from the UK and abroad, in the hope that he could identify what exactly they were.

Continue reading “Bedford Girls’ School meet Dr Anne Jungblut | The Microverse”