TASS, September 13. Three teams of the Clean Arctic - Vostok-77 expedition found in the Murmansk Region 12 texts in Sami. All copyrights of authors, editors and artists being observed, and the texts will be available at the Moscow Arctic Library, the scientific expedition's press service said.

"We have been given books in the Sami language in the electronic format. Our library's scientific reading room will offer these materials to all teachers and scientists. This is very important, since right now continues the process to approve the Kola Sami alphabet. We plan a conference with Murmansk and Moscow scientists and teachers to hear their arguments for one of the variants of the alphabet," the press service quoted the library's head Olesya Polunina as saying.

Scientists say the Sami have about 180 words to describe snow, and a few hundred phrases to describe reindeer. One of the tasks librarians face is to preserve the Northern languages, including those on the verge of extinction. Jointly with the Russian Academy of Sciences' experts they are documenting and digitizing the content obtained during the expedition.

The library's ten linguistic experts are looking for rare literary texts, artifacts, audio and video. During the expedition, they travel from the west of the Russian Arctic to the Far East to collect all ethnographic materials for the library collection. Nenets, and its closest relatives - Selkup, as well as Santy, Svenki, Sepsi - are the languages, dialects and writing of the North's indigenous peoples that are objects for studies during this year-long expedition. Further on, scientists, teachers, linguists and historians will be able to use the unique archive - both online and at the library's scientific reading room.

About expedition

Clean Arctic - Vostok-77 is the biggest scientific expedition in terms of the number of participants in continental high-latitude scientific expeditions over the history of the North's studies. It will have 77 expedition teams. The route has been structured to meet the objectives, set by the Russian Academy of Sciences' research centers, and in accordance with due studies under university grants. Over a year-long term, 700 participants from more than 20 research centers and federal universities, as well as the Russian Geographical Society volunteers, will conduct 200 studies at routes that will be as long as 12,000 km. Such a large-scale expedition is organized for the first time in recent 40 years. TASS is the expedition's general information partner.