Meet the 1,300 Librarians Racing To Back Up Ukraine's Digital Archives

In March a 44-year-old librarian at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University saved a copy of a web site about a 16th century Ukrainian politician and patron of the arts. One month later, "the original website is lost," reports the Washington Post, "its server space likely gone to cyberattacks, power outages or Russian shelling."

But thanks to that librarian, the site "remains intact on server space rented by an international group of librarians and archivists." Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 shared the Post's report: Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren't the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, the country's digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation's servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine's Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children's poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online has resulted in over 2,500 museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on rented server, eliminating the risk of them being lost forever. In the event that their facilities get destroyed in the war, the cultural officials in Ukraine have turned to an all-volunteer effort to save their collections.

They banded together, and amid sleepless nights across multiple time-zones, they recruited, trained, and organized scores of volunteers wanting to help archive Ukraine's historical websites. Large parts of the Internet get periodically archived through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which partners with the organization, but SUCHO's organizers also needed something more advanced, said Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University. In many cases, the Wayback Machine can dig into the first or second layer of a website, she added, but many documents, like pictures and uploaded files, on Ukraine's cultural websites could be seven or eight layers deep, inaccessible to traditional Web crawlers. To do that, they turned to a suite of open source digital archiving tools called Webrecorder, which have been around since the mid-2010s, and used by institutions including the United Kingdom's National Archive and the National Library of Australia...

The organizers of SUCHO get tips from librarians and archives across the world who may know of a museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up. Other volunteers have become sleuths by taking a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for signs of the museum or the library, and trying to find out if it has a website that needs to be preserved. In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to situation monitoring alert any volunteers that might be awake to look for institution websites in that region that need backing up, for fear they could go offline any minute.

Or, as that Bucknell librarian told the Post, "We're trying to save as much as possible."