Adam Smith moves to Wollaton Hall Museum

Adam Smith, who joined the project team in May, has just moved on to become Collections Access Officer [Natural Sciences] with Nottingham City Council, based at Wollaton Hall Museum. This is a permanent curatorial post, and I congratulate Adam on his success.

Adam setting up the NextEngine HR Laser Scanner on a type fossil from the BGS Collections

 

Adam commented, just before he left the project team:

“I’ve always been fascinated by fossils and wanted to be a palaeontologist from an early age. I completed degrees in palaeontology at Portsmouth and Bristol and then continued my studies in Dublin, where I conducted a PhD project specialising on plesiosaurs. Plesiosaurs are extinct marine reptiles that inhabited the ocean during the age of the dinosaurs.

I am pleased to have been part of the JISC digitisation project, working with fossils every day. The 3D models and photographs we are producing will be a valuable scientific and educational resource for everyone from academic researchers to school children. I’m sure I’ll use them myself!”

The other member to join the team at the same time as Adam was Michela Contessi, who is just completing a PhD at the University of Bologna on vertebrate ichnofossil assemblages in the Tataouine basin (South Tunisia). She has considerable experience on a number of laser scanners, including the NextEngine and has put her expertise to good use in the project.

The project lab, showing the two Canon EOS5D cameras in the fore-  and mid- ground and one of the NextEngine HR Laser Scanners at the back, being operated by  Michela. Note the “see-saw” on the camera copy stand for taking stereo photographs, and the greyscale. The cameras are controlled by computers and the digital images are transferred directly to the BGS SAN (Storage Area Network = corporate disc storage).