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The MyMuseum Project
DescriptionThis project has produced an online museum, MyMuseum which allows virtual access to the University of Aberdeen's Zoology Museum, so its collections can be shared, examined and interpreted by the world at large. The varied and often rare material in the museum is ideally suited for the purposes of teaching not only zoology, but also all aspects of biodiversity and conservation. However, the large sizes of contemporary undergraduate classes make it difficult to use the material in traditional ways and indeed much of it would be threatened with rapid distruction were it to be physically handled. Furthermore, the importance of the collections demand they be made accessible to as wide an audience as possible. MyMuseum is easily searchable and houses a collection of high-quality images, some of them capable of being rotated in space. The addition of new specimens to the virtual collection is on-going and wll continue indefinitely. One innovative feature of this resource is users can register as curators and are able to add comments or further information to the objects in the virtual collection. This facility to allow "curators" from bioscience and other disciplines to add data, and indeed new objects, to the collection, opens up an enticing opportunity to explore alternative teaching strategies. The concept of “other curators” includes students who can, for example, be assigned the task to research some of the exhibits in the context of their own field of study and to provide a database entry for that exhibit. The facility to add supplementary information allows their peers (and the original curator) to comment on their curation as well as to merely add to it. The MyMuseum resource is to be evaluated with undergraduate classes in vertebrate and invertebrate zoology and the results will be reported here in due course.
Outcomes and downloads
LinksThe University of Aberdeen's Zoology Museum
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