The Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online initiative has rescued 20 terabytes of data that ranges from Chernobyl memorials to government archives.
The night of Feb. 27, Austrian historian Sebastian Majstorovic couldn’t sleep. Three days earlier, Russia had invaded Ukraine, a country Vladimir Putin believes lays no claim to independent statehood or a distinct identity.
Ukraine’s cultural institutions hold mountains of evidence of proving Putin wrong, Majstorovic thought, but the war put this valuable knowledge and history at risk of being lost forever. While he couldn’t physically travel to Ukraine to protect museums or libraries, there was something he could do from his computer: make copies of the websites and online collections of those places.
Rattled, he got up and started using a suite of tools from the site Webrecorder to archive some cultural heritage sites from Ukraine himself,. He worked the entire night. The next morning, he asked his Twitter followers to round up digital Ukrainian collections they wanted to preserve using a Google Form.
Together, the three launched the “Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online” initiative, or SUCHO, on March 2. SUCHO works to create a digital backup of Ukrainian cultural heritage websites from museums, libraries, and public archives and their digital offerings, such as 3D collections and activities for children.
To date, SUCHO has gathered almost 20 terabytes of data and preserved more than 2,700 partial or complete websites. Their work is a race against time. More than 15% of the 3,000 websites that have been submitted by the public for backup are already offline, according to the group’s organizers. They track the status of the websites but don’t know why certain sites go offline. Some sites that disappeared were already backed up. Some were not.
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