The benefits of regional collection-based undergraduate projects: an example from Nottingham

Abstract

Hands-on access to natural history museum collections is often limited for undergraduates. An ongoing collaboration between staff at the Nottingham Natural History Museum, Wollaton Hall, and staff and students at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, was established in 2013 to allow final year undergraduate students to undertake collections-based research projects. A successful pilot project conducted on dinosaur fossils in 2013-14 led to subsequent projects based on the geological collections. The projects provide mutual benefits to students, university staff, and museum curators and their collections. In particular, students benefit from hands-on practical learning engagement with collections, university staff benefit from using the collection as a teaching resource, and the museum collections benefit from increased usage and identification or reidentification of specimens. Overall, the only notable cost is the time commitment required to develop and facilitate projects, however, this investment is richly rewarded by numerous positive outcomes.