CAFe Speaker Series: “Centering Community and Care in Rapid Response Research”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was a wake-up call for cultural heritage professionals worldwide. For several decades, cultural institutions have engaged in digitization of cultural artifacts, in light of the invasion, however, it became clear that the servers on which these digital objects are stored are as vulnerable as the buildings which house the analog originals. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is a global grassroots initiative of more than 1,500 volunteers which formed as a response to the invasion to support the digital preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. SUCHO began as an emergency web-archiving effort, preserving more than 50TB of cultural data from over 5,000 websites of Ukrainian museums, libraries, and archives.

In this talk, Anna Kijas, co-founder of SUCHO, will share the story of SUCHO and explore how this initiative drew together a community of activists with a shared vision of ensuring that digitized and born-digital cultural heritage is pre-emptively protected in the future. She will focus on how SUCHO centered community and care, promoted collaboration, and developed relationships with Ukrainian institutions and cultural heritage professionals. Much as World War II laid the groundwork for robust cultural heritage protection organizations that still operate today, the global cultural heritage community can learn from the invasion of Ukraine to plan for a more resilient future for digital cultural heritage protection that centers concepts of community and care.