Blog

3D models of historical collection objects

By Nadja Tata in Mediasphere

13.02.2023

What do a malachite, the nest of a weaverbird, an albino jackdaw and a Hercules beetle have in common? All of them belong to our dataset of 3D models of historical collection objects, published for the first time on the museum’s data portal under a free license in September 2022.

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Data portal as creative engine

By Tina Schneider in Media and Storytelling

27.01.2023

A constantly growing selection of digital collection objects of the Museum für Naturkunde is freely accessible to all interested parties in the data portal. What creative or experimental possibilities arise from this offer and what might example projects look like? Together with nine international Master’s students from the ifs Internationale Filmschule Köln, we explored this question. For the first time the data portal became part of a curriculum at a higher education institution.

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Open licenses for collection digitization

A guest contribution By Team Collection Discovery and Development in Media and Storytelling

04.01.2023

For years, the Museum für Naturkunde has advocated for the recognition and implementation of Open Science. Now, a copyright policy has been published that clarifies and provides legal certainty on licensing issues for digitized collection materials.

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Collection discovery simply explained

A guest contribution By Martin Wimmer & Max Kaplan in Media and Storytelling

30.11.2022

What do you have in your collection? Why do you want to digitize it? How exactly do you do that? What’s in it for us? Probably every museum knows these questions. With this healthy curiosity, visitors and users of exhibitions and collections make museum employees ponder. How can you answer such complex questions quickly? Quite simply: with short explanatory films.

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Our exhibit at the MS Wissenschaft 2022 in the data portal

By Jens Dobberthin

28.10.2022

The MS Wissenschaft was on the road in Germany and Austria for six months with the exhibition “Participate!”. Our exhibit on the subject of collection development was also there. Now it’s back. But you can still watch it online.

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Tangible digitization – Part 2

By Tina Schneider in Media and Storytelling

18.08.2022

On the trail of the accessible tactile experience, the Mediasphere For Nature team continues with the development of an upscaled tactile model of a dor beetle. This article shows current project developments and provides an outlook on the final project stage. 

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Virtual Natural Order between Art and Science

A guest contribution By Marlene Bart in Events

20.07.2022

“Theatrum Radix” is a transdisciplinary exhibition project with an associated series of events. It is a cooperation of the artist Marlene Bart with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Tieranatomisches Theater , which will be realized in May 2023.

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MuShell: The Music of the Sea Snails

A guest contribution By Daniel Viladrich Herrmannsdoerfer, Charlotte Roschka, Julia Stein, Daniel El-Assal, Anton Michel & Enver Felix Loayza Mora in Medien und Storytelling

08.06.2022

In the warm seabeds of this world live unique predators. Despite their slow crawl they hunt for prey with poisonous spikes. With all kinds of dots, stripes and fractals they paint their shells. We are talking about the cone and olive snails, which have fascinated people for thousands of years until today.

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Tangible digitization

By Tina Schneider in Media and Storytelling

12.05.2022

A current Mediasphere For Nature research project not only examines the topic “accessibility”, but also provides an innovative example of how to re-use our in-house collection objects. The focus is on a small inhabitant of our native wildlife: the dor beetle.

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Hacking the Ehrenberg Collection

By Jens Dobberthin

21.03.2022

For the current edition of the cultural hackathon Coding da Vinci we have contributed over 3000 historical drawings of microorganisms by famous researcher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg . Read more about how to use and remix it in this blog post.

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