Over the last week, the world showed robust solidarity with Ukraine and its people by providing political, financial and humanitarian support. In addition to generic help for Ukrainian society, in this post, DARIAH ERIC would like to highlight two valuable initiatives in support of Ukrainian colleagues in the context of academia and in contributing to the preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. They provide immediate, practical support for the Ukrainian culture and scholarly communities:
Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is a group of cultural heritage professionals – librarians, archivists, researchers, programmers – working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack. They are using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler and the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and app of the Webrecorder project.
Website: https://www.sucho.org/
#ScienceForUkraine is a community group of volunteer students and research scientists from academic institutions in Europe and around the world. Their mission is to collect and disseminate information about support opportunities at the university, national, and international level for students and researchers directly affected by the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Website: https://scienceforukraine.eu/ , Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sci_for_Ukraine
Dr. Maciej Maryl, Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, outreach coordinator of the initiative said: “We believe that we need to help fellow scholars in need and provide the means for them to sustain themselves and their families while fleeing the atrocities. Such initiatives also help to sustain Ukraine’s presence in the European Research Area, where it belongs”.
A major advantage of these initiatives is that both institutions and individuals can meaningfully contribute to them. Below is a quick overview of the kinds of actions and commitments, one can immediately join and help with.
Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)
| As a representative of an organisation | As an individual | Contact |
|---|---|---|
| If your institution has a large amount of storage available to back up the web archives SUCHO has captured, please get in touch. | 1) You can submit important URLs for collections in cultural heritage institutions in Ukraine. If you are a Ukrainian researcher in need of secure storage for research or data files, you are welcome to contact them too. 2) You can volunteer to help with the actual web-archiving. A large portion of this work does not require expert knowledge but of course, bringing in expertise on web archiving and Digital Humanities is more than welcome. | Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) | SUCHO |
Science for Ukraine
| As a representative of an organisation | As an individual | Contact |
|---|---|---|
| If your organisation (lab, department, cultural heritage institution) or research project has the capacity to offer an internship, visiting scholarship or position for research fellows from Ukraine, you can make it heard by registering it to the #ScienceForUkraine database. The support should be provided for the longest possible period, but preferably not shorter than 3 months. Even such short offers (i.e., in form of visits) could provide immediate help and allow scholars time and means to apply for more stable positions or grants. Accommodation and office/lab space should be included. | 1) You can either contribute by collecting support offers and submitting them to the #ScienceForUkraine database. 2) If your country does not yet have a coordinator, you are encouraged to volunteer for it. | Science for Ukraine – Help |
We encourage our partner institutions as well as individuals associated with the DARIAH network to support these initiatives as much as their capacities allow.
