It is good news that the Smithsonian is making its archives of millions of images freely available — this is information ought to be in the public domain. Before you start drooling at the prospect of piles of free scientific art that you can use, the implementation is a bit rough. Sure, you can search for images of “spider” in the Smithsonian collection, but you’ll get back is a hodge-podge of imagery, most of which isn’t exactly polished, and the searches are difficult to refine. I mostly got photos of spider wasps, and black and white snapshots of broken, fixed specimens from the museum archives. General terms like “skull” give you a flood of miscellaneous imagery, some of which is neat or historically interesting; try to narrow it down to, for instance, “Neanderthal skull” and you get…nothing.It’s a work in progress, I guess.
It’s an excellent start, though. Just be warned that there isn’t much in the way of curation behind it and a lot of the images look like quick photos to go into a catalog of things that are buried deep in cabinets in the bowels of the museum.
I don’t know if you know about this already but New Scientist of 8th Feb this year has an article, “Spider Smarts”. About “Arachnid intelligence is challenging our ideas about brains and consciousness”
Sounds like a good opportunity for a crowd source “tag our collection” effort, kind of the way NASA did for training their AI to locate craters on the moon.
Lunar Crater Study Demonstrates Crowdsourcing is Effective
#2 beat my to it. Curate at Home.
The bowels of museums that I have seen are awesome places.
Our museum has a goal to get as much of the collections online and searchable:
https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/
It’s a huge effort, the collection I look after, the invertebrate fossils, alone is 5 million specimens…..
Oooo ( down girl ! ) I already have too much science-Y stuff saved on my phone