Keynote talk given at Labcon2012 - a conference for Laboratory Technicians. The talk covers science in museum exhibitions, in museum research, and in programs to share museum data.
1. Sharing Australia’s
Science Heritage
Dr Elycia Wallis
Manager, Online Collections
Museum Victoria
@elyw
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/705595/micr
oscope-with-box-watson-routine-circa-1910
2. Introduction
The familiar part of
museums:
exhibitions
It’s not what you
can see: research
Data deluge, local
and global
Eastern Pygmy Possum
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria
5. Australia’s largest public museum organisation
550 EFT staff
17 million collection items in 20,000m² storage
2.5 million visitors / 460,000 education visitors annually
6+ million online visitors (Google analytics)
18. 600 million years in 60 seconds
The education program movie-making kit.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria
Read about it:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-
blog/dec-2011/active-science-education/
Education program:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbourne
museum/education/education-
programs/600-million-years-in-60-seconds/
28. Filming a fluorescing scorpion
Image: Heath Warwick
Mammal Curator Kevin Rowe with endangered heath mouse
Image: Mark Norman
Herpetologist and geneticist Jo Sumner with a stumpy tail
Image: Steve Wright
Invertebrate zoologists Richard Marchant and Ryan Duffy examining
a collection tray
Image: Mark Norman
37. TV watching/listening was found to be the activity
which took up most people's leisure time. On a
daily basis 87% of Australians watched or listened
to TV for an average of just under 3 hours (179
minutes), down slightly from the 1997 figure of 182
minutes. This means that in 2006, Australians aged
15 years and over spent a total of 42 million hours
watching or listening to TV each day.
Read about it:
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS@.nsf/0/32049C1F6913E59
5CA257968000CB4B2?opendocument
From the Australian Bureau of Statistics
54. Wet specimens held at the Natural History
Museum in London
Images: Ely Wallis
Platypus and echidna specimens in the Natural History Museum
collections in London
60. http://eol.org
…imagine for a moment that all the diversity of the
world were finally revealed and then described, say
one page to a species. (E.O. Wilson, 1992)
63. Thank-you
Dr Elycia Wallis
Manager, Online Collections
Museum Victoria
@elyw
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/705595/micr
oscope-with-box-watson-routine-circa-1910
Hinweis der Redaktion
I work at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Located in southernmost capital city of the Australian mainland.3 campuses plus world heritage listed Exhibition buildings
In the Museum world, the real challenge is in the fact that most of what large museums have in their collections never goes on display. For natural sciences museums the problem is even worse. In a fascinating article in the Taiwan Review (worth reading – see the link on the wiki) the author Chiayi Ho quotes some statistics about the British Museum and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. One of the 6 million visitors to the British Museum each year can, in a single visit to the site see approximately 42,000 objects. Obviously that’s way too many for any person during a single visit. Yet this represents just 0.006 of their collection of 7 million objects. Similarly, the National Palace Museum can only make about 0.7 percent of their collection on display at any one time. http://taiwanreview.nat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=96083&CtNode=1357National Palace Museum website:http://www.npm.gov.tw/index.htmlBritish Museum website:http://www.britishmuseum.org/
This is also where my reading for you starts to come in with Carl Zimmer’s – ‘the other museum’, an article that featured in Seed Magazine. In that article, Carl Zimmer describes how he slips into the ‘other’ museum when he’s taken away from the public part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and into the collections. Zimmer, like most of us until we work in a museum, assume that most of what is in the museum is, like a library, on display and available for us to look at. However, museums are not like libraries and most of the time, most of the objects cannot be seen by the public. In reading Zimmer’s article, you may have also followed the link through to Justine Cooper’s slideshow of behind the scenes at the AMNH. If not, let’s run through it. Her images, whilst supposed to be artful and beautiful, well illustrate the ‘other’ museum – the one that’s not on display. The commentary also reminds us that, even though most of the specimens Justine was photographing, were scientific specimens, museums are social spaces as well as a place for scientific pursuit. So I think it’s appropriate to play now, even though the next part of the discussion we’ll come back to is actually about cultural collections. **SWITCH TO INTERNET** Headphones disconnected. Runs for 7 mins 50 secshttp://seedmagazine.com/Saved_By_Science/sbs_slideshow.htmlSo the first use case I’d like to share with you is about putting cultural heritage materials online because that provides a way for visitors to access, investigate and find out about the collections, even if they cannot see the collections in person. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_awe_of_natural_history_collectionsIf it works here’s where I should play Justine Cooper’s slideshow of behind the scenes at the AMNH. http://seedmagazine.com/Saved_By_Science/sbs_slideshow.html
To start to make scientific studies of climate change and its impact on biodiversity, what scientists need is the biggest global dataset they can get. So many museums take part in an international project called GBIF. There are over 200 million specimen data records in GBIF, so if you want to know about the distribution of a species, this is the place to get the data from.
What you’re really interested in is information about the *species* not the specimen. At an international scale, there is a project that was also mentioned in the Zimmer article, which is the Encyclopedia of Life. Tagged “a webpage for every species” this project is a mega aggregator of content for every known species.