By Giles Miller Reflecting on my career at the Natural History Museum made me want to share some of the things I have learned over the years. This blog will take you through my top five tips for anyone embarking on a career as a curator. When I first arrived at the Museum, curation was a very different career prospect than it is today. In the mid 90s, I was often asked why I wanted to be a curator as I had a PhD ..read more

How the Museum's herbarium team are digitising and expanding the collection, helping to supporting worldwide scientific collaboration ..read more

The Museum is employing an innovative algorithm to catalogue environmental DNA data, aiming to accurately capture biodiversity amid growing concerns over climate change and urbanisation. The algorithm simplifies the ‘taxonomic equivalence’ process, underpinning the analysis of a range of wildlife. The method aims to rectify the time-consuming manual mapping of species and is anticipated to enable large-scale monitoring of biodiversity, aiding the development of science-based conservation solutions ..read more

A guest blog from our Summer placement students Janice Wu and Ying Luo Janice and Ying at work preparing some mollusc shells for digitisation The digitisation team started a mass approach to digitising our collections nearly a decade ago. At this time, there were very few museum employees around the country who could claim their job title was “digitiser”. Now, ten years on, the Museum has digitised 5.6 million specimens, the digitisation team has nine full-time digitisers and has been able to host two placement students this summer ..read more

National Insect Week blog by Louise Berridge Rev. Alfred Edwin Eaton (1844-1929) – photograph reproduced with permission, from the collection of the Royal Entomological Society Most of the Museum’s digitisers have encountered the entomologist Alfred Edwin Eaton (1844-1929) through his specimen labels. We are transcribing the labels of three groups of freshwater insects that Eaton often collected, the Museum’s Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera, and Plectoptera collections. Eaton’s handwriting can be challenging to decipher (see examples below ..read more

If we want to create advocates for the planet and meet our mission of galvanising a movement of millions around the planet to speak up and act for nature, then we need to be the most inclusive Museum we can be. Our vision is a future where both people and planet thrive – so we must be a museum for all people. We know we’re racing against time and there’s a lot of work to do ..read more

This blog is guest-written by Ameyalli Rios Vázquez from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a collaborator with the Museum on the Big Seaweed Search Mexico project. After an amazing two years, the Big Seaweed Search Mexico collaboration is coming to an end. Previous blogs about this project described how the team in Mexico designed and delivered an inspiring programme of activity, for young people from Sisal, Yucatán, and Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo to collaborate with professional researchers from Mexico and UK in this community science effort to monitor seaweed ..read more

salajean/Shutterstock The health of our planet depends on the existence of million species, the ecological networks in which they interact with one another, and the complex habitats they live in and modify. Humans are just one component of this living network and, therefore, we rely on nature for goods and services that underpin our societies, economies, health and wellbeing. Land use change, intensive farming and hunting of wild animals all increase our exposure to parasites and pathogens ..read more

In my last blog, the team had just arrived back from our final workshop for the Big Seaweed Search Mexico partnership and I reported on day one. On day two, we headed to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) campus just outside Mérida to explore how we could expand our work in the region. This is a big motivation for me personally – that our work could have a positive impact on the lives of local communities, so I was really excited for that ..read more

A guest blog by Larissa Welton and Leo Le Good Jelly Collection of bryozoans On March 8, International Women’s Day is observed around the world. Describing a future ‘free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination’, this year International Women’s Day encourages us all to #EmbraceEquity. At the Natural History Museum, Larissa from the digitisation team and Leo from the Library were reminded of this year’s theme when we came across a handwritten manuscript of Eliza Catherine Jelly ..read more