KARACHI, Sept 28: The University of Karachi will establish its own museum of science, natural history and art on campus for the benefit of university students and visitors, said the university vice-chancellor on Tuesday.

Speaking at the launching ceremony of computerized record of the zoology museum of the university, vice-chancellor Dr Pirzada Qasim, said that museums had not been only a place of entertainment, but also a source of self-learning, inspiration and introduction to new ideas.

He said that different departments of the university were maintaining mini-museums or exhibit-display rooms, which would be shifted and merged under one roof at a centralized location for the establishment of a big museum.

We have got collections related to the subjects of geography, geology, botany, sociology and others, which needed to be preserved on scientific lines and utilized at the optimum.

Referring to the museum of the zoology department, which was established in 1952, he said that probably no other university in the country had such a huge collections of specimens and in this connection services of its founders Dr Afzal H. Qadri and Dr Hamid Mahmood could not be forgotten.

He lauded the identification, cataloguing, photography and computerization of the specimen of different groups of animals at the zoology museum and pointed out that it would now be shared by the scientists of other countries as well.

The chairperson of the department, Dr S. Nazneen Rizvi, said that the natural history museum with rich collection of animal specimens provided a sound foundation for training in faunal composition, development, evolution, biodiversity and ecology.

She said that the museum in the zoology department held a pivotal position among the museums of private and public sector universities. "Our museum has a collection of about 0.3 million insects, considerable number of molluscan shells, crustaceans cords, fishes, snakes, birds, mammals, slides of microscopic fauna, skeletons, horns and eggs of animals," she said, adding that the classified computerized record of specimens in the form of compact disks would be helpful in increasing the interest of students in Zoology.

Dr Nazneen Rizvi requested the vice-chancellor to provide more staff, space and financial assistance for exhibition of several hundred specimens and collections of more specimens of local fauna.

The computational work was carried out under the supervision of the chairperson by Dr Rukhsana Parveen, Dr Rahila Tabassum, museum taxidermist Munawar Bukhsh, Muhammad Shafiq, Azhar Ali Khan and Riaz Ahmad Siddiqui.

A teacher of the department, Dr Ansar Rizvi, said that the Zoology museum offered good facilities for researchers, particularly in systematics, with a large repository of material of insects, marine invertebrates and other animals, while some literature was also available in the library of the museum. Prof Nighat Yasmeen Siddiqui also spoke on the occasion.