North West natural history curators’ meeting

Last week Kendal Museum hosted the meeting of natural history curators from museums in the North West of England, including curators from Manchester museum, Tullie House, Oldham and Penrith and Eden museum. It was a great opportunity to show them the work and progress of the HLF Digitisation project at Kendal museum. A talk was given by Tony Riley the Digital imaging consultant informing fellow curators about digitisation standards and how digitisation projects can be carried out on a limited budget. Following the talk there was a tour of the Image preservation studio showing digitisation in action, this sparked great interest and many questions.

After lunch Henry McGhie, Head of Collections and Curator of Zoology at Manchester Museum presented the newly developed website http://naturallycurious.co.uk/ which celebrates natural history collections in museums in the North West of England. As part of the project linking natural history collections in the North West an advocacy document is being produced promoting the value of natural science collections. This document is designed to be used to communicate with councillors, head teachers to showcase how natural science collections can be used for education and contribute to the health and wellbeing of people in the North West. Another aspect of the network is to update collection reviews; this will be useful for evaluating our collections and portraying the importance of the collections in order to secure funding for future projects. Finally it was great to hear about projects at other museums especially a major HLF funded redevelopment of Oldham museum. It was interesting to share ideas and talk about issues facing museum curators.

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