Research, Collect, Curate, and Digitize: How Undergraduates Created a New Natural History Collection

Our proposal highlights the involvement of Art and Art History undergraduate students in the creation of a natural history collection at our small liberal arts university. An internal grant provided the seed money to acquire a collection of natural specimen like skulls, taxidermied animals, wet specimens, as well as books and equipment to create "The Nature Cabinet." An upper-level Art History class called "Wonder: Art, Nature, and Museums" was created around this project with the goal of having students develop this collection under our guidance as the faculty curators. Students worked in groups to research the intellectual history and logistics surrounding cabinets of curiosities, natural history collections, and modern-day museum practice. The goal was for each group of students to propose acquisitions for our new collection based on the research they conducted. This assignment resulted in a term paper, formal presentation, and the actual acquisition of woks for our collection. Once the physical collection of the Nature Cabinet was installed within the glass-fronted vitrines in our new museum, we decided to create a digital humanities project that would make our collection available online. To realize this goal, we created on-campus internships for our Art, Design, and Art History students to begin researching objects, generating metadata, and creating the visual identity and branding of The Nature Cabinet.