Digital Archiving for Everyone: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)

Join Sebastian Majstorovic & Andreas Segerberg from the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Initiative for a talk and workshop on archiving digital content.

Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is an international grassroots initiative of over 1,500 volunteers, which supports the digital preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. Collectively, the SUCHO volunteers have archived over 50 TB of data, including several thousand Ukrainian websites, war memes, books, artworks and many other digital cultural objects. In this talk, the speakers will recount how the initiative mobilised complete strangers across the world to preserve Ukrainian cultural data and explain how it continues to support the ongoing digitization efforts in Ukraine. The talk will also outline important lessons for the future of digital preservation. The SUCHO experience has convinced the speakers that everyone can become a digital archivist and that in a world of ephemeral digital-born content, grassroots archiving is needed more than ever. To that end, the speakers will share their thoughts on which tools, approaches and strategies could help turn more people into digital archivists.

This talk will be followed by a workshop that will introduce people to web archiving tools and approaches including Wayback Machine, ArchiveWeb.page, and ReplayWeb.page.

Presenter bios

Sebastian Majstorovic is a Digital Historian, Data Scientist and one of the co-founders of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). Sebastian studied History, Film Studies, and East European area studies at Queen Mary University of London and University College London. He is currently finishing his PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His digital fields of expertise are geospatial visualization, audiovisual sources, and applied AI. Sebastian currently works as a freelance Data Science consultant and as Digital Advisor to the European Research Council project “CAPASIA – The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism,” which maps early modern trading posts in the Indian Ocean.

Andreas Segerberg is an academic with a master’s degree in Archival Science. He is a lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, where he specializes in digital preservation. Additionally, Andreas works as a software developer for digital preservation systems for both the University as well as for European Commission funded EARK-projects. In addition to his professional work, Andreas has been an active volunteer for several projects related to archives and records management, most recently Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). He has been active in the Documenting the Now! community and has contributed code to the twitter archiving tool Twarc. Furthermore, Andreas is a board member of the Swedish Society for Archives and Records Management. As a board member, he contributes to the organization's efforts to promote the importance of archives and records management, and to advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage.