Bean Town Times

Anna Kijas '08MS Helps Preserve Ukrainian Cultural Heritage

Living in a war-torn country poses acute danger to civilians. In addition, an invasion places architectural sites, art objects, and archives under threat of being looted or destroyed. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, SLIS alumna Anna Kijas immediately took action to protect Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Kijas, a music librarian at Tufts University, realized how vulnerable the collections in Ukraine had become. And as a Polish immigrant with many family members residing near the Ukrainian border, she was especially motivated to help Ukrainians preserve their history.

In March, Kijas hosted a virtual workshop with other librarians that focused on web archiving. This event quickly evolved into conversations about how to preserve Ukrainian artifacts.

"Within a few days, we had several conversations over Zoom," recalls Kijas. "My colleagues Quinn Dombrowski, Sebastian Majstorovic, and I co-founded Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)." The specialists who lend their expertise to the initiative do so on a volunteer basis. "In the first week, we set up a Google form for volunteers, and we immediately got over 1,000 volunteers to sign up," says Kijas. In the beginning, SUCHO had between 300-400 people working on different tasks, as the war dragged on the number of people committed to working on this initiative decreased, so we now have around 50 or so core people, but every few days new volunteers emerge.

Original source can be found  here