Black and white photo of Three unknown women using office equipment. Boxes of accounting machine cards are piled up on the floor.

It would be hard to miss that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen an exponential rise in programming, availability, use, and debate in the last few years. Here at Te Papa, we’ve been looking at possible use cases for the Digital Museum, and investigating safe ways to connect the collections to visitors. In this blog, Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins describes his experiments with ways Generative AI can tell richer stories and enable deeper connections to our collection database.Read more

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In: Behind the scenes, Collections Online
A screenshot of several thumbnails of plant specimens.

Where can you find harakeke outside Aotearoa? What species of forget-me-not live on Banks Peninsula?* Answering these questions is now a lot easier because our herbarium’s botanical specimen data – 250,000 records about plants, with information about what they are, where they’re from and lots more – have been released on the world’s biggest database of living things, GBIF. Kaitūhono Hora Raraunga | Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader tells you about making it happen.Read more

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In: Behind the scenes, Science
Photo of a forget me not, Myosotis brevis, being pointed at because it’s very small, on Wikimedia Commons

We generate a lot of data at Te Papa. Specimens. Photographs. Facts and figures. We’re always thinking of ways to get that data out there and into your hands – and recently we’ve been diving headfirst into Wikipedia. Here, Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader talks about the work that went into getting hundreds of images of forget-me-nots onto the site, allowing them to spread across the web.Read more

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In: Science