Thank you very much! We can tell you how to do it.
.
We've got plenty of useful things. But we still miss something.
Until we compile an itemised list of our possibilities / needs, we present here a
wish list in a very general form. A short list of things we'd be glad to receive
as a gift or purchase at a reduced price is given below.
.
If, after you got acquainted with our activities, you'd like to
support some of them financially, you can do it via the St. Petersburg Society of
Naturalists.
Right now (winter, the right season for the lab...)
we need some more:
Binocular microscopes We work on the binocular microscopes, which
are kindly provided by the Department for Entomology of the St. Petersburg State University.
The problem is that these microscopes are pretty old, and, like so many other old things,
they decompose. The department, quite obviously, has no funds to afford the new microscopes,
and our prospects, accordingly, are rather gloomy.
Insect pins Russia is notorious for lacking many useful things.
Insect pins are among the latter. Not only the Russians do not make pins, they even do not
sell officially the pins produced somewhere outside. The only pins we use are those smuggled
occasionally from abroad. So, we'd be much indebted even for providing us with a channel
of pins purchase, let alone your generous gifts.
Identification keys and atlases In our work, we use the books
from the library of the department and from the A. Kouprianov private library. These libraries,
however, are not without some shortcomings. Besides that both libraries suffer from careless
students who sometimes do not return books. This leakage is small comparing the size of the
library (the cynic average is about one book per three to four years only) but always painful.
The situation is complicated by a peculiar system of books printing. In Russia, unlike many
other countries, a book once printed in a limited number of copies, has little chances to be
re-printed again (unless it is a cheap detective series or a school textbook).
This system of continuous re-printing which is so familiar for the European and American
readers is absolutely unknown in the domain of the Russian scientific literature. So, if the
library loses a book, the given book can be returned only by chance via the system of
"used book" shops.
If you want to help us, contact us via e-mail: tinea@chat.ru Or call: +7 (812) 328-9679 (Wed, Fri, and Sat from 18:00 till 20:00 Moscow time GMT+3)
You can contact also the St. Petersburg Naturalists' Society (see above).
