An official website of the United States government
Outreach insect drawers serve as valuable educational tools, showcasing insect diversity and fostering curiosity. However, these static displays often fail to bridge the emotional gap between people and insects. Here, I discuss how by incorporating live insects, namely male bumble bees and carpenter bees, into outreach events might help to reduce fear and foster empathy amongst the public. I argue that, by integrating live insects with traditional displays, we can inspire deeper connections and encourage conservation efforts, ensuring that people see insects as living organisms worth protecting, rather than just specimens behind glass. Future research questions and suggestions regarding evaluation of outreach collections are discussed.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on August 27, 2026
A framework for the assessment of outreach drawers in insect collections
Insect research collections often include outreach drawers displaying specimens to enhance public awareness and access to scientific knowledge at various events. Despite their educational value, there is limited understanding of how these drawers are designed, used, or evaluated for quality. As a first step towards understanding these aspects, we surveyed members of the community who use insect drawers for public outreach. Survey results indicate that curators and collection managers consider outreach drawers important and use them widely at events, though they are rarely assessed beyond aesthetics and/or anecdotal audience feedback. The number and thematic scope of these drawers vary significantly among institutions, from as few as 3 to more than 50, and covering topics from collection history to pollinator conservation. However, few institutions display these collections online, limiting access to in-person events. Their maintenance and development are also often constrained by limited funding and staff availability. To guide decisions and efforts to enhance the educational impact and accessibility of outreach drawers, we introduce a quick-assessment tool based on five criteria: information, relevance, aesthetics, potential for engagement and inspiration. The next step is to apply appropriate tools to measure public engagement with these displays.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2101851
- PAR ID:
- 10633128
- Publisher / Repository:
- Pensoft
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Natural History Collections and Museomics
- Volume:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 3033-0955
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Museums are local‐to‐global organizations operating in a digitized, distributed, and diverse 21st century world. Museums leaders face significant challenges in achieving broader relevance, meaningful engagement, and equitable outreach. This article examines the transformative potential of digitized collections to increase public engagement and enhance authentic educational efforts of museums, with specific emphasis on visual media as a key resource to achieve these outcomes. Using digitized collections to broaden learning opportunities and support a wide range of users will require museum leaders to engage in strategic digitization efforts—supplementing research images, making conscious decisions about meeting educational needs when setting digitization policies, and investing in meaningful outreach with digitized collections. Educational opportunities are contextualized with brief case studies of authentic investigations for middle school learners using digitized objects from a natural history museum. Three lessons learned during development and evaluation are described and implications for museum leaders are discussed.more » « less
-
A comprehensive overview of volunteer-driven public programs focused on activities to enhance natural history collections (NHCs) is provided. The initiative revolves around the WeDigBio events and the Collections Club at the Field Museum, aiming to deepen the public’s connection with scientific collections, enhance participatory science, and improve data associated with natural history specimens. The implementation and journey of these programs are outlined, including surveys conducted from 2015 through 2021 to gauge participant motivation, satisfaction, and the impact of these events on public engagement with NHCs. Results show trends in on-site and virtual volunteer participation over the years, especially during the peak period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of participants expressed high satisfaction, indicating a willingness to continue participating in similar activities. The surveys revealed a shift towards more altruistic motivations for participation over time, with increased emphasis on supporting the Field Museum and contributing to the scientific community. The success of participatory science events demonstrates the potential of volunteer-driven programs to contribute meaningfully to the preservation, digitisation, and understanding of biodiversity collections, ultimately transforming spectators into stewards of natural history. From 2015 to present participants celebrate a significant milestone, with over a thousand community scientists contributing to the inventorying, collection care, curation, databasing, or transcription of 286,071 specimens, objects or records. We also discuss accuracy and quality control as well as a checklist and recommendations for similar activities.more » « less
-
Diggle, P (Ed.)Combining ecological questions with evolutionary con- text generates novel insight into both ecology and evo- lution. However, our ability to draw broad inferences can be limited by the taxonomic diversity present within and across species at a site. Public gardens (including botan- ical gardens and arboreta) may focus solely on aesthetics in developing their gardens, but some public gardens include scientific inquiry and conservation at the core of their missions (Hohn, 2022). These scientifically oriented public gardens follow community standards of excellence (Hohn, 2022) to provide unique access to curated plant collections specifically designed to gather high levels of biodiversity, both among and within species, at a single geographic location. These research‐grade collections include long‐lived species cared for over many decades. Such public gardens have long histories of conducting and supporting research harnessing the power inherent in these diverse collections, including explorations of sys- tematics, ecophysiology, and ecology. By bringing together species, as well as individuals within species, from across broad spatial ranges into a single site, these collections offer living repositories of diversity ripe for scientific exploration as de facto common gardens (Dosmann, 2006; Dosmann and Groover, 2012; Primack et al., 2021).more » « less
-
Leal, JH; Bieler, R (Ed.)Among biocollections, mollusks are a particularly powerful resource for a wide range of studies, including biogeography, conservation, ecology, environmental monitoring, evolutionary biology, and systematics. U.S. mollusk collections are housed in stand-alone natural history museums, at universities, and in a variety of governmental and non-governmental institutions. Differing in their histories, specializations, and uses, they share common needs for long-term development, and collectively contribute to biodiversity knowledge at regional, national, and global scales. Commitment by dedicated staff, collectors, and volunteers, institutional investments, philanthropy, and governmental funding have built and maintained these collections and their support infrastructure. Efforts by the North American malacological collection community since the early 1970s led to coordination in database design but left the data isolated in individual institutions. Collection digitization developed through a combination of individual/institutional initiatives and federally supported projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Advances in digital technology enabled the shift toward nationally and globally unified collections. Networking and collaboration were greatly accelerated by NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, which created a central coordinating organization (iDigBio) and funded Thematic Collections Network (TCN) projects. One such TCN was developed to mobilize nearly 90% of the known U.S. museum-collections-based data of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts (Mobilizing Millions of Marine Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard—ESB). The project, involving 16 museum collections (plus the Smithsonian Institution as federal partner), combines data from approximately 4.5 million specimens collected from the ESB region and makes them available to the TCN portal InvertEBase and other aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF. In addition to fostering community and expanding the corpus of available digitized mollusk records through new data entry and georeferencing (GEOLocate, CoGe) and standardizing taxonomy, the project drove key innovations for the invertebrate collections community. For instance, it worked with the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) group to create a new Darwin Core standard term, “Vitality”, expanded GEOLocate to support complex geospatial types, integrated global elevation and bathymetric datasets directly into georeferencing workflow, and developed various education and outreach public outreach products. Synthesizing from the 15 following articles with individual histories of ESB-participating mollusk collections, several topics are discussed—such as what defines a “good” mollusk collection in the digital age and the importance of federal support for this national resource.more » « less
