Last Friday, Laurence invited me to take some photographs at Science Uncovered at the Natural History Museum. I’m always overjoyed at any excuse to visit my favourite museum, so I naturally said yes and travelled into the NHM in the late afternoon to help/get in the way/photograph the set-up for the lovely folks who were working on Crowdsourcing the Collection.
During the evening, the team were showing the visitors to the museum exactly how the collection gets digitised at the NHM: examining and photographing specimens, transcribing the images to retrieve data about the specimens, and even geo-referencing! The most important part about this, however, was that the NHM was inviting the visitors to help transcribe the specimens themselves..!
As always, there were lots of lovely scientists on-hand to answer any questions that visitors had about transcribing specimens, as well as questions about entomology and the collection in general.
If you fancy transcribing a specimen yourself (you know you want to!) please follow this link (if you’re a bit unsure about what the terms mean, remember to click on the “i” for more information). To learn a bit more about Crowdsourcing the Collection, please have a wander over to the Beetle Blog on the NHM website, and to see loads of photos taken at various Science Uncovered events please take a gander at the NHM’s Pinterest Board of the events.