Dr. Alexey P. Seregin is a senior botanist and currently serves as the Curator of the Herbarium (MW) at the Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. With extensive experience in botanical taxonomy, he has conducted field investigations across Russia, Europe, Central Asia, and other regions, personally collecting over 27,000 plant specimens.

The Moscow University Herbarium (MW) is Russia's oldest and the second largest botanical repository. It serves as a critical foundation for global plant taxonomy, biodiversity research, and environmental monitoring. This presentation explores the dual nature of the herbarium, highlighting the management of its massive physical archive and its rapid transformation into a world-class digital resource. The physical collection contains over one million specimens. It requires rigorous curation to protect historical and type specimens dating back to the 18th century. In parallel, the Moscow Digital Herbarium initiative has revolutionized access to these holdings. By utilizing high-throughput imaging and automated metadata extraction, the project has digitized the entire collection, making it one of the largest datasets on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This talk will examine the workflow of balancing physical conservation with digital mobilization. We will discuss how web-based tools, citizen science, and artificial intelligence are used to verify labels and map species distributions. Ultimately, we demonstrate how bridging the gap between physical artifacts and open-access data accelerates modern botanical research and fosters global scientific collaboration.