What may sound like a simple act — scanning and downloading content from websites — is playing an important role in the effort to preserve Ukraine’s history and heritage.
Canadians are among those involved in a global mission to preserve digital content and data from Ukraine’s cultural heritage institutions, under threat by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country nearly two months ago.
The group, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, has more than 1,300 professionals, from librarians and archivists to researchers and programmers, who are volunteering to identify and archive important Ukrainian websites that have data sitting on servers in universities, libraries, museums and galleries.
"We know the indiscriminate bombardment that’s going on there, so they’re in danger all the time," University of Alberta librarian Peter Binkley told CTV’s Your Morning from Edmonton.
"No doubt they have backup arrangements but those are vulnerable too. So the idea is to grab everything we can and store it in a way that is reusable, retrievable, outside of Ukraine so that if anything does get lost, we have copies that we can then, after the war, return to the owners in Ukraine."
Binkley got involved after seeing a tweet from one of the organizers, Quinn Dombrowski at Stanford University.
The group said it has saved more than 30 terabytes of scanned documents, artwork and other material from more than 3,500 websites to date.
In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, considered the country’s cultural capital, efforts also have been underway for weeks to preserve physical items such as statues, stained-glass windows, manuscripts and significant architectural monuments.
In the online world, Binkley said they are still finding more material that needs saving.
"So there’s still plenty to do," he said.
On top of that, the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies ixjmtzyws involved in a parallel project called the Archives Rescue Team that is helping back up research that has not yet been published, but also may be on personal computers and university servers in Ukraine.
While the work remains ongoing, Binkley said the ideal outcome would be if their archives and backups weren’t needed.
"If nothing is destroyed, then we did all this work and it won’t have a place to go, so that would be wonderful, but the risk is so great," he said.
"The likelihood is that we’re saving stuff that would otherwise have been lost, and as a librarian that’s where our hearts are."
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Men look on as firefighters work to extinguish a fire after an airstrike hit a tire shop in Lviv, Ukraine, April 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Mykola Tys)
