Keynote presentation given at Labcon 2012
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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.
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Keynote presentation given at Labcon 2012
- 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
- 3. Part 1. The familiar part of museums
- 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)
- 8. Collections Research Exhibitions Programs
- 9. Elephant exhibition at Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin Image: Ely Wallis
- 10. Sue the T. Rex at the Field Museum, Chicago Image: Ely Wallis
- 11. Wild at Melbourne Museum
- 12. World Wide Animal Viewers in Wild at Melbourne Museum
- 13. World Wide Animal Viewers in Wild at Melbourne Museum
- 14. Dynamic Earth at Melbourne Museum
- 15. 3-d immersive theatre in Dynamic Earth
- 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/
- 19. Social media
- 20. Part 2. It’s not what you can see but what you can’t
- 21. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thematthewblack/6950586208/ 42,000 objects on display From a collection of 7 million objects That’s 0.006 of their collection
- 22. Wet collections at Museum für Naturkunde Image: Ely Wallis
- 23. Read about it: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_awe_of_natural_history_collections/ http://seedmagazine.com/Saved_By_Science/sbs_slideshow.html “The Waiting Room,” from the Saved by Science series by Justine Cooper.
- 24. Read about it: http://www.niwa.co.nz/news/%E2%80%98supergiant%E2%80%99-amphipods-discovered-7-kilometres-deep Supergiant amphipod caught in the Kermadec Trench off New Zealand. Sources: Photo copyright of Oceanlab, University of Aberdeen, UK
- 26. Read about it: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/11/19/%E2%80%9Cnew%E2%80%9D-species-gather-dust-on-museum- shelves-for-21-years-before-being-described/#.UL2DYuSTx2B “New” species gather dust on museum shelves for 21 years before being described Ed Yong, November 19, Discover Magazine
- 27. http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-blog/nov-2012/gallery-of-the-grampians-survey/ http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-blog/nov-2012/secret-diary-of-a-field-trip/ Grampians Bioscan, November 2012 Parks Victoria and Museum Victoria
- 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
- 38. Part 3. The data deluge – local and global
- 39. Example screen from collection database
- 40. Red kangaroo specimens in Museum Victoria’s collections
- 41. Red kangaroo specimens in all Australian museums collections
- 42. Heat map of Red kangaroo specimens in museum collections and including observations
- 44. All museum specimens from OZCAM
- 47. Atlas of Living Australia concept diagram
- 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
- 56. Image: Joe Coleman Source: Museum Victoria Book scanning and rare books in MV library Image: Jon Augier Source: Museum Victoria
- 58. Atlas of Living Australia concept diagram
- 59. http://gbif.org
- 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
Editor's Notes
- 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.