Archiving the Ukrainian Internet; Preserving Objects of Cultural Value

 

"More than 1,200 volunteers with SUCHO have saved 10 terabytes of data including 14,000 uploaded items (images and PDFs) and captured parts of 2,300 websites so far. This includes material from Ukrainian museums, library websites, digital exhibits, open access publications and elsewhere.The initiative is using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content. Some of the information is stored at the Internet Archive, where it can be discovered and accessed using open-source software." (Volunteers Rally to Archive Ukrainian Web Sites)

In March 2022 a group of CSOs, including the Internet Archive, announced efforts to save  what they could of Ukrainian culture and cultural objects online ((Volunteers Rally to Archive Ukrainian Web Sites). It may be recalled that cultural objects may be lost both by direct targeted activities.  Such objects may also be lost especially where such objects are found online, through the targeted or reckless destruction of online infrastructures--servers, and the infrastructure necessary to support the storage and retrieval of such material. The destruction of infrastructure, especially in recent months meant to bomb the Ukrainian population back to the Stone Age and break their spirit and capacity to continue to wage defensive war against the forces of regular and irregular Russia adds to the risk of loss. Preservation, then, may require not just duplication but expatriation of the objects and the infrastructure within which they may be preserved. 

Through Archive-It, a customizable self-service web archiving platform that captures, stores, and provides access to web-based content, free online accounts have been offered to volunteer archivists. Mirage Berry, business development manager for Archive-It, has coordinated support with other preservation partners including the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, and East European & Central Asian Studies Collections librarian Liladhar Pendse at University of California, Berkeley. (Volunteers Rally to Archive Ukrainian Web Sites)

As important, of course, is the destruction of the physical objects that are represented online. The semiotics of the effort ought not to be lost.  One here preserves not the object in certain cases, but the representation of that object, as encoded and retrieval online. Where the object thus represented  is important because of its physical characteristics (a painting, sculpture, etc) then the preservation efforts are doubled--first to protect the physical object, and then to preserve its representation online. This applies to text as well--especially where the objects onto which text is first encoded (old manuscripts or printed works) are themselves of cultural value in their own right.

It appears that the targeting of cultural property will be yet another basis of liability-a double accountability--for whatever government in Russia is ultimately faced with the consequences of this military adventurism with an increasingly apparent absence of moral compass.