Outlining the aims and format of the project «Digitisation of natural history collections damaged as a result of hostilities and related factors: development of protocols and implementation based on the State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine»

Abstract

This article presents the format and outlines the goals and objectives of the project: "Digitisation of natural collections damaged by hostilities and associated factors: development of protocols and implementation based on the State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine." This project, financed by the National Research Fund of Ukraine as part of the competition "Science for the Reconstruction of Ukraine in the War and Post-War Periods", involves the development of protocols and testing of digitisation technologies for vulnerable natural history museum collections and will be implemented in 2023-2024. The State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine collections will be used to develop the protocols. Still, in general, the project has broader tasks. It is primarily aimed at the digitisation and virtual availability of natural collections that have already been damaged due to hostilities and related factors or may be damaged or lost shortly. Among the most vulnerable collections are those that require careful observance of the storage regime and are the first to undergo destruction or can be easily lost due to direct damage (for example, fire). Among such collections of the State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the collections of invertebrate animals and herbarium funds, which were formed in 1870 and today constitute the object of the national heritage of Ukraine, have been identified. These collections are unique regarding the representativeness of the western region of Ukraine, although they are not limited to it. If these collections are lost, restoring or replacing damaged samples with equivalent ones is impossible. The consequence of the loss or damage of these collections will be the formation of a significant gap in the documentation of the history of the flora and fauna of the western region of Ukraine, which will be impossible to fill with existing data or cover with other, including foreign, collections. That is why, in martial law conditions, it is essential to develop protocols for the rapid digitisation of the most valuable and most vulnerable samples that have already suffered or may potentially suffer damage due to hostilities.