TOMSK, January 8 – RIA Tomsk. Specialists of Tomsk State University (TSU) will digitize the herbarium materials, which are stored in the higher education institution, by 2022 within work of the Trans-Siberian Scientific Way center, the chief scientific secretary of TSU Lyudmila Borilo reported to RIA Tomsk.
Earlier it was reported that the Trans-Siberian Scientific Way Center (TSSW) was officially opened in TSU at the beginning of February, 2016. It is designed to become a hub for carrying out cross-disciplinary researches of the region with involvement of scientific groups from around the world.
"To digitize the herbarium completely, we need more than five years – we have counted. And we carry out this process with those resources which we have <…>. And the first collections are digitized and translated into three languages: Russian, English, Chinese. Process goes continuously", – she told, having added that works on digitization of the herbarium have begun in 2016.
The interlocutor of the agency explained that there are unique collections collected by scientists of TSU in the herbarium. "There are no such collections in any herbarium of the world. And they can just disappear – they spoil, people can't be allowed to them. And if we digitize it and we expose, scientists of the whole world will be able to use it", – she noted.Borilo specified that it is planned to create the single database in the future based on the supercomputer of TSU, where materials of the herbarium, the museum of archeology and ethnography, the scientific library and other divisions of university will be stored. The first summary catalogs are planned to be constituted in 2017.
The herbarium of TSU was founded in 1885 as the Botanical museum by the botanist Porfiry Krylov invited from Kazan. Now there are more than 500 thousand samples in the fund of the herbarium. It is among the largest herbariums of Russia in size of the fund and is the third in system of the higher education.