THE MODEL COLLECTION OF AQUATIC INSECTS OF UKRAINE: CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO THE FORMATION, REPLENISHMENT AND FUNCTIONING

Abstract

During the last 150 years, Lviv scientific and educational institutions are the centers of active investigations on the aquatic insects. Diduszycki’ Museum became the center of systematic study of aquatic insects. As a result, important historical collections of taxonomic groups of insects have been accumulated primarily thanks to efforts of J. Dziędzielewicz, M. Łomnicki and J. Łomnicki. Studies started up in the 1960’s and continued until the First World War, and were restored after 80 years by the scientists of the State Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine. All this time collections of the aquatic insects and other orders of insects were kept in the scientific collections of this institution. Part of the collections of aquatic insects moved to Poland, along with their founder, Józef Dziędzielewicz who moved from Lviv to Myślenice in 1915. Today, a significant part of the materials preserved in the raw material collections of the museum needs proper scientific research, appropriate conservation and inventory for the purpose of long-term preservation within the collections of the State Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine. All actions for the long-term storage of museum objects should be carried out at the modern scientific and methodological level in such a way as to ensure in the future the processing of collection materials by various methods of the integrative taxonomy. The paper is devoted to the important aspect of the scientific and stock activities of the natural history museums – development of the conceptual approaches to the formation, replenishment, scientific, technical and informational support for the functioning of model collections. The scientifically substantiated approaches to the formation, replenishment and scientific and technical support of functioning of the model collection on the basis of existing standards, instructions and methods, taking into account the foreign experience of museum activity, have been developed. A series of measures have been taken in order to unify the design of a collection of alcohol samples of various taxonomic groups and a collection of slides. The templates of labels have been developed and editing of available information in the museum database on selected groups of aquatic insects is done. Developed approaches for electronic processing of collections were tested on a basis of the Internet portal of the Data Centre „Biodiversity of Ukraine”.