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Volunteers rush to create backups of websites, archives
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Initiatives aim to preserve Ukraine’s cultural patrimony
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Files could also serve as war crimes evidence, say backers
By Umberto Bacchi
TBILISI, April 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As air raid sirens sounded over Kyiv in late February, some of the staff at Ukraine’s Ivan Honchar Museum decided to leave the relative safety of the bomb shelter and return to their desks to back up digital copies of its folk culture artefacts.
Days before Russia invaded, President Vladimir Putin had called Ukraine an artificial creation – words the ethnographic museum’s staff saw as a threat to the distinctive Ukrainian culture they have dedicated their careers to documenting.
“We had a big responsibility to save this culture,” said Myroslava Vertiuk, deputy head at the museum, whose collection includes art, paintings, clothing and musical instruments.
The employees’ rescue mission involved uploading digital copies of the exhibits, as well as intangible assets such as recordings of local folk music to a cloud database.
“We wanted to make sure that if the collection was damaged or destroyed, we could rebuild it,” Vertiuk told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
