The Bavarian State Library saves Ukrainian cultural assets. -Munich
What can I do? After it became known that Russian soldiers were marching into Ukraine, this became a specific question for many in this country. Be it to help the people affected or maybe just to counteract the feeling of powerlessness. Also with Gudrun Wirtz and her employees from the Eastern Europe department In the Bavarian State Library, this question came up on the first day of the war. But also: What does this mean for our work? Her first reaction: When she was doing public relations specialized information services Eastern, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe “Focusing on information about the Ukraine and our own Ukraine holdings”, says Gudrun Wirtz. “In order to clearly oppose the Russian narrative that a Ukraine or Ukrainian culture does not exist at all, so to speak.”
Sure, against tanks and missiles that doesn’t help. But this war is also about attacking and defending Ukrainian culture. There are already several initiatives trying to save Ukrainian cultural assets. This includes physical goods such as books, buildings and works of art, but also digital goods such as e-books, digital copies or websites. “And so we decided on the Monday after the start of the war,” says the head of the Eastern Europe department on the phone, “that we will download e-books from transparent repositories on a larger scale.” That means from document servers of universities and libraries. And another decision: “To archive the websites that we have catalogued.”
There are also many completed research projects in Ukraine
Because the Eastern Europe department not only contains two to three thousand Ukrainian books per year (Wirtz estimates the total stock at 150,000). For 20 years she has been running “a Database with scientifically relevant internet resources”. It often has a lot of information about the history of the city. Or digitizing exhibits. There is also a lot of completed research and digital documentation of excavations in Ukraine. These are things that are highly endangered because they document Ukraine’s ancient history independent of Russia.”
All this could be lost through attacks on institutions, servers or directly on websites. Hence the idea of not only cataloging the pages, but also archiving them. But: In Germany, something like this is only allowed with the consent of the author. And so Wirtz pricked up his ears when she heard Sebastian Majstorovic’s call from the Austrian on Twitter Center for Digital Humanities and Heritage in Vienna to work for SUCHO (www.sucho.org) noticed. SUCHO stands for “Store Ukrainian cultural heritage online”. An initiative that Majstorovic founded together with two American librarians and which now has more than 1,300 librarians, archivists and programmers as volunteers. Together they have now secured more than 40 terabytes of material from more than 4500 websites. Including those that were cataloged by the State Library.
The Internet Archive and Amazon also support SUCHO
SUCHO was supported by Internet Archive from San Francisco. Amazon has also made storage space available in its cloud. In addition to Gudrun Wirtz, there were six employees from the Eastern Europe department and three employees from the digitization department in the State Library who finally helped with the cooperation with SUCHO. Starting this week, two refugee Ukrainian librarians will also support the Eastern Europe department. Your posts will be dated Friends of the Bavarian State Library maintain.
What happens to the websites? Well, the ideal case is: Most remain and their copies are not used at all. SUCHO will not do anything with it without the consent of the Ukrainians. “And that’s what I like about the project,” says Gudrun Wirtz. Incidentally, her department is currently in the process of setting up an archive with worldwide websites dealing with the war in Ukraine in cooperation with the library of the University of Berkeley. And otherwise they had “various plans”. To support Ukraine and to do whatever they can as a library.