ИСТИНА

Imaging of specimens is the modern trend in the herbarium management. Today, at least 62 herbaria have 1M+ specimens and at least eight herbaria have estimated their collections as 1M. Even in the larger herbaria mass digitisation is still not a common practice. In late 2014, the Moscow University Herbarium (MW) had received direct investment for digitisation within the grant #14-50-00029 from the Russian Science Foundation as part of the National Depository Bank of Live Systems Initiative launched by the Moscow State University. As of November 2016, MW Herbarium holds 1,011,253 specimens being the 60th largest herbarium in the world and the second largest in Russia. An average annual increase in the last 12 years was 15,100 specimens. We employed new technical staff to facilitate further growth of the collections, intensified the collection management and 22,013 specimens were added in 2016 as a result. The MW Herbarium holds 37,100 species and subspecies of vascular plants and 2,223 species and subspecies of mosses and liverworts. Having the stable budget for the next four years, we decided to scan 1M specimens at 300 dpi (TIFF + JPG) in 2015–2018, to digitise 4.6K type specimens at 600 dpi, to scan 78K labels from bryophyte capsules, and finally to database and georeference label data from as much specimens as possible until exhaustion of the budget. As of 6 January 2017, the Moscow Digital Herbarium consists of 785,887 specimens—712,925 images of vascular plants and 72,962 images of bryophyte labels. Vascular plant specimens are originated from Eastern Europe—357,951 images; Asian Russia—159,663 images; Caucasus—97,400 images; the Crimea—31,790 images; Mongolia—27,323 images; South Asia—22,649 images; Africa—7,559 images; types at 600 dpi—4,630 images; Herbarium Alchemillarum—3,960 images; and labels from capsules of mosses—72 962 images. Collections from Middle Asia, Western Europe, Americas, Australia and Oceania, liverwort labels, and historical collections are not yet digitised. At the moment, we operate the sixth largest digital herbarium in the world. The Moscow Digital Herbarium is the largest Russian biodiversity database. The Moscow Digital Herbarium publishes its data on the web portal of the National Depository Bank of Live Systems, a collaborative network of the Moscow University biological collections. Since October 2016, a fast public version of the botany portal with some functional limitations is available at http://plant.depo.msu.ru/, whereas an operational version is available at https://plant.mitotech.ru/. The National Depository online system is open for contributions from other Russian biological collections and soon will be visible via GBIF. We are nearly ready to start in 2017 data capturing from labels. To avoid mistakes and to make the first portion of label capturing easy, we will not enforce the operators to capture data from every single sheet. We will ask the operators to avoid capturing data from labels with at least one unclear word or to tick any uncertain entries. Also, we are ready to pay modest remuneration for professional botanists from small institutions and universities for capturing the data which might be interesting for them using the forms on our web portal.