ИСТИНА

Moscow Digital Herbarium is an initiative of the Moscow State University. In 2015, we started complete imaging of the Moscow University Herbarium (MW) at 300 dpi (1). This budget-consuming work was completely covered by the megagrant # 14-50-00029 from the Russian Science Foundation (РНФ). Year by year our commercial partner imaged all geographical branches of MW Herbarium with ca. 968,000 images available by the end of 2018. In October 2016, we launched an efficient web-portal of Moscow Digital Herbarium (available at http://plant.depo.msu.ru/) to deliver the images of our herbarium specimens to a wider audience with some basic associated metadata like ID, species name and geographical area (2). From that time, we also began complete databasing of our collections to include complete metadata – 1) transcriptions of labels as a result of manual text capturing, 2) OCR transcription of printed elements, and 3) geographical coordinates. By the end of 2018, we finally imaged and published online 968,000 specimens (93%), captured 135,800 labels (13%), georeferenced 323,000 specimens (31%) and made all possible automatic OCR transcriptions using Tesseract 3 (it was successful for 330,100 specimens without text transcriptions). Unfortunately, we failed to raise budget for the whole process to reach triple-100% for imaging, label capturing and georeferencing. Currently, Moscow University Herbarium is acting as an international institution with no more than 65% of holdings coming from Russia, but national funding agencies enforced us to focus our activity on the Russian projects. So, to finish the mission and to keep high standards of digitization efforts for new accessions we proposed several regional projects which were later formally approved by funding agencies. We focused our proposals on a few regions which are especially well represented in our collection. 1. The City of Moscow and Moscow Oblast (the research project # 19-34-70018 funded by RFBR and Moscow city Government). Within this project we aimed to database and georeference all labels from Moscow and surrounding Moscow Oblast from two herbaria – Moscow University Herbarium (76,000 specimens) and Main Botanical Garden Herbarium (38,000 specimens). The project made Main Botanical Garden (MHA), which holds the second largest herbarium in Moscow, the second publisher of the Moscow Digital Herbarium. 2. European Russia (project # Russia2019_14 funded by FinBIF within Data mobilization in European Russia programme). The Moscow Digital Herbarium is the largest biodiversity database in Russia and at present the largest Russian dataset published in GBIF (3), but only 31% of the records were georeferenced by the end of 2018. We expect that the project will allow georeferencing of an additional 54,450 specimens from European Russia by the end of September 2019. 3. Western Caucasus (the research project # 19-44-233012 funded by RFBR and Krasnodar Krai Government). The Caucasus is the only biodiversity hotspot of international importance in Russia, which makes it the top priority area for the national floristic studies. The goal of the project is to create the most complete dataset on the floristic diversity of the Russia's richest regional flora. The portal will include at least 25,000 specimens from the Moscow University Herbarium, including new accessions. 4. Tula Oblast (the research project # 19-44-710002 funded by RFBR and Tula Oblast Government). The goal of the project is to assess the actual diversity and spatial structure of the flora of the Tula Oblast by combining various data sources on a single platform. To do this, it is supposed to combine the data of five local herbarium collections on our web-platform. What lessons we learned after finishing of on-purpose financial support? (1) Never give up! We applied for 16 grants, competition and prizes to keep our work moving. The most precious trophies were not conquered, but nonetheless we have five medium-sized grants to promote regional missions. (2) Do not rely on volunteers in your work. You will spend dozens of hours to teach a volunteer with no guarantee that he will come tomorrow. Think twice, do you really need him? (3) Virtual consolidation of lesser collections within a larger web-hub is a budget-efficient solution. Have no portal? Start publishing via GBIF.