Curation and creation: the Lapworth Museum of Geology summer scholarship

Museums fascinate me. Grand buildings filled with historic treasures and wondrous insights into how the Earth once was, always occupied with enthusiastic and welcoming staff and volunteers. As a Palaeontology and Geology student, I often find myself struggling to fit in among the die-hard vertebrate palaeontology students or knowledgeable future geologists, their abilities to relay facts about any aspect of the degree never came naturally to me and it wasn’t until the Field and Museum Skills module in my third year that I knew who I wanted to become. This module opened my eyes to the behind-the-scenes world of museums and ignited my passion for curation and public engagement. While I admittedly never knew the Lapworth Museum of Geology existed before starting my degree at the University of Birmingham, it soon became my favourite place on campus and henceforth, as soon as the 25-year-running summer scholarship programme was advertised, I leapt at the opportunity to apply. After successfully completing the application and interview process, I was fortunate enough to be offered the scholarship alongside fellow students, and now friends, Adam Abrahams and Honna Mahmood.

Throughout August, we embarked on a four-week experience, and while Honna and Adam focused on cataloguing the Masirah Ophiolite collection, I organised and catalogued 17 boxes filled to the brim with various specimens previously removed from storage for display. Aiming to return these to the museum stores, the first process required organising these specimens by age (the most efficient way to store specimens in the museum) and thus, a detailed palaeontological timeline was created. From here, specimens were sorted into boxes, and eventually returned to their rightful place in the stores. Any specimens without unique identifying numbers have been catalogued and will also make their way to the stores in due course.

Twice during our tenure, the Museum ran Family Fun Days aimed at giving families a free and educational summer holiday activity. During “Wonders of the Ice Age” on 7 August, us scholarship students staffed an interactive table educating people on teeth. Albeit hesitant, I loved these public events and personally found it extremely rewarding seeing children (and adults alike) fascinated by the different teeth on display, with one parent even coming back to thank me as they claim their daughter has never been so engaged in anything educational before! The second family fun day, “Colossal Creatures and Tiny Treasures” on 22 August aimed to boast the biggest and smallest specimens in the Museum and as I enjoyed helping at the first, I embarked on the challenge of creating an interactive activity for the next. With a focus on dinosaur footprints, I used Inkscape to create a trackway map and some fact files for an ornithopod, therapod, and sauropod, giving people the challenge of reading the descriptions and trying to identify which footprint belonged to which dinosaur.

Another task focusing on public engagement involved generating two social media posts for the Museum’s accounts. This task gave us the freedom to choose specimens, research these and create appealing captions, and even learning photography skills. Being given the opportunity to develop my engagement skills and help introduce the Museum to wider members of the general public was rewarding and enriching, and I’m very grateful to have been part of this.

Finally, we were also able to embrace the ever-changing capabilities of technology and create 3D models of specimens using structured light scanning. Carefully choosing specimens from the stores, making sure they weren’t too big or too shiny for example, we learnt how to use a light scanner in order to digitise specimens. Using Artec Studio software, we learnt to edit and align photos from the scanner and watched our work as they became vibrant 3D images.

Without question, I’d recommend the Lapworth summer scholarship to anyone interested in museum studies. This programme taught me invaluable skills that I have no doubt will benefit my future museum career, and it cannot be left unsaid that I made friends across Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences that I may not have had the chance to otherwise. This museum - like many others across the UK - is an irreplaceable asset to science and the local community and I’ll forever be grateful to Jon Clatworthy, J. D. Dixon, Jake Atterby, Andy Jones, and the whole Museum Team for giving me the chance to work alongside them.