Curation is a key part of the Identification Trainers for the Future programme and over the past 2 months the trainees have been on placement in the Museum collections learning how best to preserve the historical and ecological information held within them. Following on from Anthony’s review of his time with the Odonata collections, Sally Hyslop brings us up to speed with her own project:
My curation placement is in the British and Irish Herbarium, working alongside Mark Spencer, the senior curator of this impressive catalogue of pressed plant specimens.
Each specimen in the herbarium holds information – whether it be from the DNA stored within the plants themselves waiting to be extracted and studied, or the historical annotations which depict the collection event itself. All specimens in the collection have a label describing the all-important who, what, where and when.
The date, location, name of the collector and the collector’s original identification is essential information which can further our scientific understanding.