A San Jose library science professor is doing all she can to preserve her hometown library — and her country’s culture — in Cherkasy, Ukraine.
The night Russian bombs began falling, Dr. Ulia Gosart was 6,000 miles from her native Ukraine.
Gosart contacted her hometown library’s director, Luidmila Diadyk, to figure out what was most needed. The library had no digital copies of what it held in its stacks — even its 1860 edition of, one of the last book of poems to be published while its famous author and library namesake, Taras Shevchenko, was still alive. As the war’s frontlines continued to expand, Gosart knew the library needed reinforcements.
“The past doesn’t take care of itself. It takes active, human intervention to ensure things stick around,” said Quinn Dombrowski, one of the founders of SUCHO and an academic technology specialist at Stanford University. “What we’re archiving now are the materials that will reflect a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s history.”
Cherkasy is a small, riverside city 100 miles south of Kyiv, with a population less than a third of San Jose’s. The city has remained relatively safe, but after a year of conflict, no region has been left unscathed. Air raids and electricity blackouts are a part of everyday life. Children have lost their fathers as they’ve gone to fight at the frontlines. And for Gosart, Dombrowski, and librarians across the world, something else is at stake, too: the history of Ukraine.
“ Putin has made statements that make it very clear he doesn’t see Ukraine as a distinctive country,” said Dombrowski. “Our goal was, and continues to be, to assert that it absolutely is, and that Ukraine has a culture that deserves to be protected.” Around the time the first scanner was delivered to Cherkasy last fall, Gosart and Diadyk coordinated a drawing competition among children in the area — not only at the regional library but at the 40 other smaller libraries it oversees. Hundreds of children participated at their local libraries, where they painted, colored and drew theirEight-year-old Daria Tertyshna painted a scene of gray and blue, with a tank in the foreground and a crying eye on the horizon.
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