Article detailing how museums are working to digitize their estimated 3 billion natural history specimens! See also The Peabody Museum’s immense project putting specimens online that date back to 1866.
- Meet Isabella Bird one of the 19th century’s most remarkable women travellers and browse her photographs.
- A new light on the glass flowers at The Harvard Museum of Natural History. ‘The collection’s fame rests not on its uniqueness or even its breadth — it includes ferns, fungi, bryophytes, and algae as well as flowering plants — but on its accuracy and beauty’. Explore #glassflowers for more.
- Brilliant article in The Guardian about ‘how the humblebee became the bumblebee‘.
- ‘Psychic snail sex couldn’t replace the telegraph, but one Frenchman sure tried‘ – article from Atlas Obscura detailing how Jacques Toussaint Benoît believed that snails, once mated, had a lifelong telepathic bond that could be harnessed to revolutionise human communication.
- The International Centre for Victorian Women Writers ‘From Brontë to Bloomsbury Third International Conference: Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1880s and 1890s‘ at Canterbury Christ Church University, on the 25-26 July 2016.
- Call for Papers – Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space -17-18 February 2017 University of Birmingham.Understanding Material Loss seeks to uncover the multiple practices and institutions that emerged in response to different forms of material loss in the past and asks, how has loss shaped (and been shaped by) processes of acquisition, po@ssession, stability, abundance and permanence. – Please send proposals (250 words max per paper) for papers and panels to conference organizer Kate Smith (k.smith@bham.ac.uk) by Friday 14 October 2016. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Roundtable panels featuring 5-6 papers of 10 minutes each or other innovative formats are encouraged. More details available at: https://understandingmaterialloss2017.wordpress.com/ .
- twitter account of the week @NHM_Oology for behind the scenes, specimens, stories, science and research on The Natural History Museum’s collection of birds’ eggs & nests.
Curating historical duck & goose down collection- inc. slides by Rev CJ Pring #InternationalMuseumDay #MuseumDay pic.twitter.com/JbWYCXmmtq
— NHM Oology (@NHM_Oology) May 18, 2016
Getting sidetracked exploring the fantastic systematised colour charts produced by first curator of birds @NMNH pic.twitter.com/bDiz8QMiVq
— NHM Oology (@NHM_Oology) May 13, 2016