June 28 (BTA/GNA) – The Natural History Museums of Bulgaria and Nigeria are cooperating in a digitization project. As part of it, Nigerian sciences Professor Benjamin Adisa Ogunfolacan is on a working visit to Bulgaria to gather experience in the digitization of museum collections. He is Director of the Museum of Natural History with Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University.
He is a guest of the Museum of Natural History of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NMNHS). The two museum institutions are involved in a joint project on digitization of cultural heritage. Under the project, the Nigerian cluster of the European Network of Cultural Centres (ENCC) will fund the digitization of the collections of the Ile-Ife Museum of Natural History under a EU-backed project. Under the same programme, Germany will receive a researcher from the Museum of African History in Benin, Spain will host a scholar from the Museum of Modern Art in Lagos and the Czech Republic will host a scholar from the Museum of Modern History in Abuja.
This is a project that was largely initiated by Nigeria, through the Bulgarian Embassy in Abuja, and with the help of the Goethe Institute’s representation in the African country, said the director of the Natural History Museum with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Pavel Stoev.
The idea was to assist the Ile-Ife Museum of Natural History, which is the only natural history museum in Nigeria, in digitizing their specimens. The collections of the two museums have similar characteristics and include objects of living and non-living nature: fossils, minerals and rocks, but also specimens of insects, birds, mammals.
The reason for choosing the Sofia Natural History Museum for this partnership is related to the fact that together with the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, it is part of the Scientific Infrastructure Distributed System of Scientific Collections – Bulgaria (DiSSCo-BG), which participates in the Pan-European Distributed Scientific Infrastructure. Since last year both, BAS structures are beneficiaries of this international digitization project. The ultimate goal is to create a common European portal through which scientists, managers and administrators of biological information can check the specimens available in all participating institutions for their scientific needs.
Prof. Adisa has been in Bulgaria since June 22 and will be here until the end of the month. He is holding working meetings with the curators of all departments of the Sofia Natural History Museum, visiting related museums (at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum, at the Anthropological Museum at the Institute of Experimental Morphology, Pathology and Anthropology with a museum, at the National Archaeological Institute with a museum), and at the Academy itself.
Bulgaria has traditions in African studies, especially during socialism, Prof. Pavel Stoev said. Bulgarian scientists have organized or participated in many expeditions to various parts of the continent, including Nigeria. Unfortunately, in the last 20-30 years, these contacts have been lost, he added, noting that the current partnership is an opportunity to continue this activity and to re-establish the interest of Bulgarian zoologists and botanists in Africa. This is one of the most interesting continents for natural history researchers, Prof. Stoev said.
The next step in this partnership with the Natural History Museum is to pay a return visit to Ile-Ife and from there the two sides will think about joint activities.
GNA
Credit: BTA