Caffeine Break - Digital Dunkirk - High-speed all-volunteer Ukrainian data rescue with SUCHO.org - Friday, April 22, 2022

How would you react if someone said “Hey, there’s an entire country with thousands of years of libraries and archives and manuscripts and culture in danger of being bombed into oblivion. Let’s go rescue all their cultural heritage data! By the way, you don’t have any employees. Or a budget. Or software. Or even a working knowledge of the alphabet these sites are written in. And the bombs started falling three days ago. And sites are going offline as you read this. What are you going to do about it?” 

A reasonable person would probably have said “Look, we need three years and a couple million dollars to do something on the scale of an entire country.” 

I am occasionally not a reasonable person. What I actually said was, “Hey Cordelia, can I take some vacation time on extremely short notice?” 

Cordelia is all-purpose amazing, and she said yes. (In fact, she said "Take two weeks.")

So this is my own small piece of the story of digital Dunkirk, where the owners of an all-volunteer fleet of devices ranging from Raspberry Pis to HPC clusters sailed out onto the Internet to rescue as much Ukrainian online cultural heritage as we could find. 

Some of the (many) discoveries I can share: 

·       How to coordinate 1,000+  worldwide volunteers using free and open source tools, a lot of high speed process and training revisions, and generously donated storage and knowledge from world-renowned experts  

·       How to go from "one of 1,000 volunteers" on March 4 to "kind of 5th in command of an all-volunteer mostly-librarian army" on March 7

·       What an astonishing amount of high-speed heritage preservation an all-volunteer team can accomplish when you hand them user-friendly tools and simple-enough processes (30 terabytes and counting)

·       When your processes are changing every day, how to provide either self-documenting or near-target-documenting systems for keeping people in sync across 20 time zones 

·       How to go from “Nobody knows how to preserve a dSpace repository without a login” to “Here’s a Python script” in a week  

·       How to go from “step 1, install a virtual machine” to “step 1, paste a URL in this web browser and click Play” in 3 hours 

·       How to launch a cloud service 3 months earlier than planned 

·       How to absorb the meaning of words in an alphabet you can't pronounce while short-circuiting straight from "unpronounceable symbols" to "English translation" through linguistic osmosis

·       Where to find (and how to preserve) a lot of amazing museums, incredible theatrical productions, delicious recipes, and adorable zoos and children’s libraries 
 

Join me this Friday morning with a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage for a tour of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO.org).

(Also, my apologies to Zoe LeBlanc - I had the wrong "Zoe from the UIUC Library" listed in the PowerPoint!) 

Zoom Recording ID: 91425597572 UUID: L6fkmVUBTxaZp1+T0+QsiQ== Meeting Time: 2022-04-22T13:24:32Z