Teams of archivists and librarians work to save Ukrainian library and museum collections
This article by Ksenya Kiebuzinski, University of Toronto, originally appeared on Conversation and is republished here with permission.
My mother was born in Sambir, Ukraine, and my father in Przemyśl, Poland. They both spent their childhood as refugees.
They lived among displaced Ukrainians who had fled to Austria and Germany as the Red Army advanced in July 1944. My grandparents’ decision to abandon their homes and leave everything behind saved my parents of the tyranny of the Soviet occupation.
They were among 200,000 Ukrainians who chose to live in exile rather than be repatriated to the Soviet Union. They organized themselves around civic, educational, cultural and political interests. Within these circles, Ukrainians have produced newsletters, pamphlets and books to connect with each other and tell the world about the country’s history.
This publication effort builds on the work done by Ukrainians who immigrated for economic reasons to North America beginning in the 1890s, and those who lived abroad for political reasons during the early revolutionary era. of the 1920s.
I am the custodian of these publications in my role as a librarian who develops, makes accessible and researches the Ukrainian and other Slavic language collections at the University of Toronto Libraries.
The Ukrainian holdings in our library – whether published in Ukraine under Austrian, Polish or Russian rule, at independence or in refugee centers and diaspora communities – offer a perspective on the distinct history of Ukraine that distinguishes it from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s belief that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia.”
Ukrainian culture and history in libraries
Librarians and libraries around the world play a role in preserving and sharing Ukraine’s cultural history. They acquire Western observations on Ukraine or material printed on its territories. And people can learn a lot from these resources.
French architect and military engineer, map of Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan, Map of Ukrainefirst depicted the country as a discrete territory with demarcated borders in 1660. It was commissioned by King Władysław IV of Poland to help him better understand the land and its people in order to protect the territory from enemies (in especially Russia).
In History of Charles XII (1731), Voltaire similarly describes and textually maps Ukraine as the country of the Cossacks, located between Little Tartary, Poland and Muscovy. He said: “Ukraine has always wanted to be free.”
Other documents in our libraries bear physical traces of the horrors of Soviet domination. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, a gospel book printed in Pochaiv, Ukraine, between 1735 and 1758, and written in Church Slavonic, bears a notation that it was donated to the golden-domed monastery of St. Michael in kyiv, “to remain forever irremovable from the church. However, this monastery was destroyed by order of Stalin in the mid-1930s, and the library volumes were sold by the Soviet government.
But books also enter library collections through more honest means – refugees sometimes donate their personal libraries to universities. At the University of Toronto, we have a handwritten and watercolored issue of a Ukrainian POW periodical entitled Liazaroni (Vagabond) (1920). It was produced in an internment camp near Cassino, Italy, where tens of thousands of Ukrainians were held captive after fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army.
Among the nearly 1,000 books and pamphlets that were published by displaced Ukrainians after World War II is a children’s story that I remember reading in my youth, housed at the University of Toronto. The book, Bim-bom, dzelen’-bom! (1949), tells how a group of chickens and cats help put out a fire in a house. A passage from the book can be applied to Russia’s war against Ukraine:
“Roosters, hens and chicks, cats and kittens know how to work together to save their home. So, you little ones, learn to live in the world, and to defend your country against all dangers!
Ukrainian printed and digital knowledge under threat
Today, teams of archivists and librarians are responding to a similar call and working to safeguard the collections of Ukrainian libraries and museums. Their efforts echo the work of the Monuments Men who, during World War II, gave “first aid to art and the book” and engaged in the recovery of cultural materials.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that Russian military police were destroying Ukrainian literature and history textbooks. Russian forces also bombarded archives, libraries and museums.
They destroyed the archives of the Chernihiv security service that documented the Soviet repression against Ukrainians, they also damaged the Korolenko State Scientific Library in Kharkiv, the second largest library collection in Ukraine.
Archive staff in Ukraine work around the clock to digitize paper documents and move the digitized content to servers abroad. Librarians and volunteers also pack and plan disposal of books.
Maintaining and preserving online archives or digital wartime artifacts is difficult. They are as precarious as print because they depend on the infrastructure of the physical world. Computer equipment connected to cables and servers needs electricity to operate. Power outages or server failures can mean temporary or permanent loss of data.
More than 1,000 volunteers, in partnership with universities in Canada and the United States, participate in the participatory project called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) to preserve and secure digitized manuscripts, music, photographs, models 3D architectural and other publications. So far, the team has captured 15,000 files, which are accessible through the Internet Archive.
Just as libraries have collected, preserved and shared the knowledge held by their own institutions over the past century, they are now sharing this knowledge globally so that, once the war is over, Ukraine can see its cultural treasures. saved and restored.
Ksenya Kiebuzinski, Slavic Resource Coordinator and Director, Petro Jacyk Resource Centre, University of Toronto Libraries, University of Toronto
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
