Keynote presentation given at Labcon 2012

Editor's Notes

• #5: I work at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Located in southernmost capital city of the Australian mainland.3 campuses plus world heritage listed Exhibition buildings
• #22: 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/
• #24: 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
• #60: 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.
• #61: 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.