Natural Science Collections of the Institute of Coal, FRCCC of SD of AS, as a fundamental foundation of popularizing the coal science: issues of systematization and exhibiting

In contemporary information society, scientific museums have an important mission of preserving and popularizing the humanity's scientific and technical achievements. The socio-cultural reality imposes great demands on the museum as an information and communicative system; these demands have a goal of wide dissemination of scientific information serving to raise the general level of education in society, and the moral upbringing of the younger generation. To document the process of the respective science development and to raise awareness of its achievements, the museum has a challenging task of introducing interpretation into its collections in the process of performing cultural and scientific activities. One important condition of forming strategies of developing communicative opportunities is the analysis of existing practices of the respective scientific field; this analysis is conducted already at the stage of creating an exhibit that accounts for systematization peculiarity, as demanded by the scientific field. When studying the natural scientific collections of the Institute of Coal of the Federal Research Center on Coal and Coal Chemistry in the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences, we see the importance and relevance of documenting in the coal science in Kemerovo Region, the largest coal-developing region of Russia. Its comprehensive approach to disseminating the cotemporary scientific views on coal, based on the respective scientific research and museum study, dictated concrete topical aspects of geology, coal study, coal chemistry, history of science and production, which, when taken together, determine the scientific principles of systematizing the collection data. The demand for the scientifically based disciplinary grouping of the natural scientific materials in the Institute of Coal, FRCCC of SD of AS while organizing exhibits, calls for utilizing both the traditional forms of interpreting museum collections including such auxiliary scientific materials as maps, posters, diagrams, photos, artistic illustrations, and the new technological museum technologies. The latter include electronic exhibits, including computer information provided to the visitors (presentations, databases, theme-unified video displays, digitized fragments of the video archives). Making natural museum exhibits interactive and dramatic and thus making the process of particular scientific knowledge popularization more successful, the museum technologies should include easy-to-use equipment, contemporary 3D-visualization products, as well as multimedia means, as additional information channels. At the current stage, information provided by the scientific museum and its popularization among the widest audience encourages cultural awareness in society and is an intellectual, economic and ecological resource for a stable civilizational development.

Keywords

Authors

References