ИСТИНА

In 2018, employees of the Onithological Section of the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University completed the digitization of collection represented by stuffed and flat skins, as well as mounted birds. To date, all the Section"s storage units that have inventory IDs have been included in a integrated single electronic database. The bird collection of the Museum is the second largest in Russia and is one of the twenty largest collections in the world. Digitization of this huge massive of information was conducted by staff members together with temporary assistants under the supervision of scientific staff. All the data were taken directly from the collection labels. The first 20 490 rows were added to the database in 2000–2014 during the new collections registration fresh cataloguing of the type specimens. Targeted work on the creation of a full database covered three years from January 2015 to December 2017. In the process of digitization, participants faced a number of problems. Some of them were: duplication of inventory IDs; determination of the accurate coordinates for the collection localities; the establishing of the correct surnames and initials of little-known collectors. The search and correction of uncertainties in the database records is still continues. Nevertheless, we can report significant results of the work even now. The species identification of several hundred birds was refined or processed de novo. The exact number of storage units of the Section was determined precisely: at the moment of the end of May 2018 there are 129 979 specimens including 2 193 downy chicks excluding birds of the permanent Museum exposition, and those sent somewhere for exchange. Twenty one specimen represent extinct or probably extinct taxa. The most notable sources that formed the Museum funds were collections of G.I. Langsdorf, M.M. Berezovsky, V.N. Bostanzhoglo, G.I. Polyakov, S.A. Buturlin, V.A. Khakhlov, V.M. Gudkov, as well as the material collected by Museum staff during different years. The creation of the network database with parallel access for several operators based on MySQL server became an important frontier in the work of the Section, after which many of the usual operations were accelerated and optimized notably. For the purpose of accessibility for specialists from around the world, the database is published on the official website of the Museum and in biobank of the Moscow State University. Currently, a portion of the database for the collection of bird tissue samples, which are the source for DNA extraction is being completed. In the nearest future we are planning to digitize collections of alcohol preserved materials and clutches, as well as publication of articles involving data from the electronic catalogue including the catalogue of type specimens. The work was carried out with the financial support of the RNF grant № 14-50-00029 "Scientific foundations for the creation of a National Depository Bank of Live Systems".