Meet the 1,300 Librarians Racing To Back Up Ukraine's Digital Archives (msn.com) 39
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. The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (or SUCHO), have resulted in over 2,500 of the country's museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they've rented, eliminating the risk they'll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war....
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...
SUCHO's organizers receive tips from librarians and archivists across the world who may know of a rare museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up. Other volunteers have become sleuths, using Google Maps to take a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for any signs that might say "museum" or "library" and trying to find out if it has a website that needs archiving. In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to "situation monitoring" alerts 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."
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. The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (or SUCHO), have resulted in over 2,500 of the country's museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they've rented, eliminating the risk they'll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war....
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...
SUCHO's organizers receive tips from librarians and archivists across the world who may know of a rare museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up. Other volunteers have become sleuths, using Google Maps to take a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for any signs that might say "museum" or "library" and trying to find out if it has a website that needs archiving. In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to "situation monitoring" alerts 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."
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lol what a dumbass. Parts of the fire control system for their shiny new Armata tanks come from abroad.
Re:I'm doing my bit (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of their missiles and helicopter engines come from Ukraine...
And "for some reason" they stopped sending spares and parts...
The engines of Russian military helicopters and key components for warships, cruise missiles and the majority of the nation’s fighter jets are all made in Ukrainian factories, the Telegraph reports." [metro.co.uk]
OOPS.
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That's another great piece of this puzzle. It provides yet another motivation for invasion, controlling more of the supply chain... if they intended further aggression towards ever more distant neighbors. And why not? If nations actually switch to renewables then Russia is fucked with a capital fuck.
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Renewables increase dependence on natural gas (and reduce dependence on coal). To reduce dependence on oil, we need to switch to electric cars.
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Renewables increase dependence on natural gas
Only if you don't overprovision, but they're cheap enough that you can do so.
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Maybe overprovisioning is possible in a way that reduces dependence on natural gas, but so far no one has done that.
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I'm doing my bit
We wouldn't want gems like this from Luckyo to be lost
LOL, truly a classic.
What is it with all the glee. What Ukrainian's really need are more contributions to humanitarian relief funds and organizations like the Red Cross.
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> Give a Ukrainian a fish and he eats for a day. Shoot enough Russians in the head. And Ukrainians can go back to growing and exporting fuckloads of food themselves. No more bandaids. Just fix the problem.
Extremism will only get more suffering and violence for everyone. It never 'just fixes the problem'. Even in the short term. It just perpetuates blinkered logic and human on human atrocities.
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> So your 'solution' is to just let Russia comment more and more atrocities until it gets bored?
I said nothing like that. I was responding to the parent and said the solution isn't to commit more atrocities. My first comment in the thread asked why a lot of people sound gleeful when they list atrocities but I've been getting mostly strawmen in response. Though it's true my question was also rhetorical.
Now I'm wondering why a lot of people when speaking about this conflict (or most any one) either try to
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> The first comment was gleeful about pointing out Luckyo being completely wrong and stupid. The more people that know the better.
I was more about what I see as the morbid gleefulness of some people when they're posting their lists of Russian soldier atrocities as if that in itself was an argument.
On Luckyo, if someone wants to post to let people know they think he's wrong and stupid, nothing wrong with that.
> You thinking letting the Ukrainians defend themselves against genocide, is somehow committin
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By the way, of course some Ukrainians are committing atrocities
Exactly what Luckyo says. Are you sure you're not an alt? How many Ukrainians are systematically raping civilians? Human shields? Murdering civilians?
I don't know many. Some are, no one doubts that. What I said was "of course some Ukrainians are committing atrocities, but that doesn't mean that Ukrainian's defending themselves from, or attacking, Russian soldiers are committing atrocities". So you can't compare the two and it definitely doesn't mean Ukrainians are committing as much or as bad as the Russian soldiers.
> Nobody is falling for your "both sides do it" nonsense. De-escalation? Because nobody with an ounce of common sense is going to surrend
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How accurate would you say are the following two paragraphs :
Considering, exposing, or analyzing the subtleties, context and history, and what needs to be done concerning all that's involved in the current conflict, should be done, and is being done, behind closed doors by politicians, diplomats, generals, negotiators, humanitarian organizations, etc. --- but that to do that in public, in media, or comment sections, only gives ammunition and righteousness to those who initiated, or want to perpetuate, the c
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Sorry, but I'll get back to you tomorrow, I've been too busy today to have the time to given your comment the attention it deserves.
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> You're completely unhinged. Do you get all your info from Russian state TV? The only kind of TV there btw. You still haven't given the slightest hint about how this "de-escalation" would be possible. You should start there. If you have any good ideas, why not tell everyone what they are? Instead of just repeating your nonsense over and over.
Escalation is easy to talk about and do, deescalation not so much.
Deescalation is about how one responds to ongoing events, military exchanges, political talks, neg
There are grass roots efforts. (Score:2)
This is one I'm aware of [reddit.com], I'm sure there are many others.
In march a librarian. Out march the Russians (Score:1)
In march, a librarian...
An editor would know the difference.
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In march, a librarian rarely keeps pace because they are only used to slowly transporting books.
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Always do this (Score:5, Interesting)
And lookie! https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com] .
Librarians have stood up to people who want knowledge erased before, and now that the Bath Salt people are around, it is probably good to look at any web based information in danger areas to save it. Good work, my Library nerds and nerdettes.
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I'm not seeing the same diligence to undo the deletion of digital content from Youtube. Left-wing Russian critics, Abby Martin, and Chris Hedges have had entire catalogs of material deleted with zero recourse. I presume that their 'free speech' rights were revoked because they each have a long history of pointing out American hypocrisy about invading other countries and sharing criticisms of the military-industrial complex.
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I'm not seeing the same diligence to undo the deletion of digital content from Youtube. Left-wing Russian critics, Abby Martin, and Chris Hedges have had entire catalogs of material deleted with zero recourse. I presume that their 'free speech' rights were revoked because they each have a long history of pointing out American hypocrisy about invading other countries and sharing criticisms of the military-industrial complex.
I'm not certain I'd group YT with librarians, although it's an interesting point. There is always Locals if the folks were smart enough to not use YT as the storage of their stuff.
"forever" (Score:1)
Is it just me, or that only a vulernerable, temporary mitigation is the level of data rescue that they've achieved?
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Any server out of harms way (rented or otherwise), is likely much safer than a server in harms way (as in: one in location that might be bombed / shelled / shot up / stolen by Russian soldiers / whatever). Not to mention connectivity to the servers involved. Networks in war zones tend to be unreliable...
If nothing else, it provides temporary redundancy (on original server + on temporary server where backup is stored), and buys archivists time to come up with a (better) long-term solution.
Now for a torrent (Score:2)
Given that there are probably those who are willing to sabotage the effort, by hacking the systems these librarians are using, I wonder whether then non-PII stuff should be wrapped up into a torrent, so it can be distributed far and wide?
I do worry about certain anti-Ukrainian hackers wanting to help destroy Ukraine’s cultural legacy, in the same way Russia is doing with Ukraine’s architectural legacy.
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in the same way Russia is doing with Ukraine’s architectural legacy.
Russia is destroying monuments to the friendship between Ukraine and Russia, not to mention shelling and killing Russian-speaking people in Mariupol and other locations. Do you think they care if architecture is destroyed?
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in the same way Russia is doing with Ukraine’s architectural legacy.
Russia is destroying monuments to the friendship between Ukraine and Russia, not to mention shelling and killing Russian-speaking people in Mariupol and other locations. Do you think they care if architecture is destroyed?
Of they don’t. It feels like this point if Putin can’t win the country he is wanting to leave it desolate, in a humanitarian form, in a cultural form and in an economical form. It will leave the nation scarred and needing a lot of aid from friendly nations to rebuild, not because Ukraine couldn’t do it on its own, but because it may take decades otherwise for its people and industries to recover.
No offsite backup? (Score:2)
saving history is great but -- (Score:3)
"a 16th century Ukrainian politician and patron of the arts"
Who is this guy? Guy, of course because women were unimportant.
We don't know his name but we know a lot about him. He was a politician. He was a patron of the arts. Thus we can assume like most leaders he stole money not rightfully his and lived in luxury at the expense of the common man (and woman).
These are the people who appear in encyclopedias and biographies. The people we respect and admire. The people whose names appear on respectable buildings and whom we remember for generations. Russia has scads of revered scoundrels who robbed and killed their own people for at least 100 years. The US has quite a few, both living and dead who will become famous and who were more interested in power and plunder than defending the Constitution and serving the citizens.
It is time to elevate real heroes and burn the bios of the high and mighty. Your local firefighter is more of a hero than any elected or appointed official.