The Journey of a Specimen: a Blogging Campaign for the KU Natural History Museum

Abstract

The KU Natural History Museum has a staggering collection of over 8 million biological specimens. This project attempts to demonstrate how to bring this collection closer to the public via photos and text presented on the museum's blog. To produce a prototype for future publications, existing museum websites and blogs were reviewed and literature on web audiences was evaluated. The investigator built content for the prototype by collecting images and text through a trip to Peru, conducting interviews with significant researchers, and taking photographs of a sample of the museum's collection. The final prototype for the project included eight posts which demonstrate an organization scheme in which content was divided into two subsections - the journey of a specimen from the field to the lab, and the usefulness of a group of specimens once put into the collection.