Canadians participate in the Save Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) project to protect the digital collections of Ukrainian cultural institutions from potential piracy software.
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As of April 18, the group has more than 1,300 cultural heritage professionals around the world, librarians, archivists, researchers and programmers working together voluntarily to identify and archive websites that could be attacked in the context of the war in Ukraine.
“The idea is to grab whatever we can and store it in a way that that content is reusable, outside of Ukraine, so that if something gets lost, we’ll have copies that can then, after the war, go back to the Ukrainians”, explained Peter Binkley, librarian of the University of Alberta, in an interview with CTV.
So far, the group says it has backed up more than 30 terabytes of digitized documents, artworks and other materials from over 3,500 museum, library and archive websites nationwide.
Alongside SUCHO, the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta is involved in another project called the “Archive Safeguarding Team” which helps to save research that has not yet been published and that reside on personal computers and university servers in Ukraine.
“There is still a lot to do,” said Mr. Binkley, who hopes that these backups are useless and that no digital attack targets these sites.
“If nothing is destroyed […]that would be wonderful, but the risk is so great. […] We are likely to save things that would otherwise have been lost,” he added.