Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
In my role as an assistant digitiser, I have been working to transcribe some of the Museum’s freshwater insects. Whilst looking at the labels of these specimens a pattern started to emerge around the types of data being recorded and I wanted to find out more.
Continue reading “Freshwater Insects UK vs the World | Digital Collections”
We are opening up the Museum’s Bee type collection to the world by digitising, geo referencing and releasing the specimens online. Continue reading “Creating a buzz around the world| Digital Collections Programme”
On the 19-22 October, the Museum will be running a digital volunteering event in collaboration with the third annual WeDigBio event. WeDigBio is a four day event that engages global participants online and on-site in digitising natural history collections. Continue reading “We need your help to set our collections data free! |Digital Collections Programme”
We have now finished digitising the Museum’s main parasitic louse slide collection – consisting of ~73,000 slides. We are sharing these openly with the global scientific community on the Museum’s Data Portal. Continue reading “Lice taking over the land and the ocean | Digital Collections Programme”
The Museum’s Sensational Butterflies exhibition is host to over 500 butterflies each year. Each morning, work in the Museum’s butterfly house starts two hours before the exhibition opens because it takes constant attention to maintain the ideal environment for these butterflies to flourish. One of the aspects that needs to be attended to is pest control.
One of the most significant pests that needs to be kept under control in the butterfly house are Aphids.
Continue reading “Butterflies and their sensational parasitoids | Digital Collections Programme”
With good weather forecast for most of the UK this coming weekend, and local schools breaking for half-term, many of you will be making a bee-line for the coasts… where you could be rock-pooling for science!
Our Big Seaweed Search invites you to take photos of seaweeds and submit your observations online to help Museum researcher Juliet Brodie better understand how rising sea temperatures and other changes are affecting our beautiful seas.
You can request a free Big Seaweed Search guide by emailing your name and postal address to seaweeds@nhm.ac.uk, or download and print your own to find out how to take part. In fact, the Museum is celebrating the oceans this year, and there are many ways to get involved in our year-long exploration of the marine world! Continue reading “Take part in ocean science – on the beach or from your computer! | Citizen Science”
We are in the process of digitising the Museum’s parasitic louse (Phthiraptera) collection, which consists of around 73,000 microscope slides. The collection is one of the largest – and the most taxonomically comprehensive – in the world.
Lice are permanent ectoparasites, meaning they live on the outside of their bird and mammal hosts. They are highly host specific, with the majority of the ~5,000 louse species being unique to a particular host species of mammals and birds.
Our previous blog post looked at preparing the Lepidoptera for digitisation. In this post, we will look at the second part of the digitisation process; the imaging and transcription that allows data to be set free and accessed by the global science audience on the Museum’s Data Portal.
Let’s find out what’s involved and why it’s leading to new ways of accessing and using the information in our collections. Continue reading “Our butterfly and moth data takes flight! | Digital Collections Programme”
Visiteering offers one day volunteering opportunities to the public, linking our Museum narratives to a series of set ‘challenges’ relating to our collections. On 20 October we completed our first collaborative Visiteering session to coincide with a worldwide transcription event run by WeDigBio.
WeDigBio, is a four day event that engages global participants online and onsite in digitising natural history collections. Although our main focus was our Visiteers in the lab for a day, we also encouraged other visitors to the museum to engage in the project via posters with QR codes and promoted a worldwide audience to get involved with blogposts and social media promotion prior, during and post event.
On Friday 30 September the Miniature Lives Magnified team joined our colleagues in the halls of the Museum in South Kensington for our annual festival, Science Uncovered.
The theme for this year’s event for European Researchers’ Night was Hidden Worlds – a perfect opportunity to invite folks to give our online The Killer Within Expedition a go, and to show off our chalcid wasps!
It was wonderful to meet with such a wide range of visitors, from children coming straight from school with their families, to young adults enjoying a date night with a beer in hand, and of course the full range of ages as Museum-goers enjoyed the chance to chat with all our scientists and learn more about their work.
Continue reading “Magnifying the miniature at Science Uncovered 2016 | Miniature Lives Magnified”