Featuring Anna Kijas, Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship, Head of the Lilly Music Library, Tufts University
On December 4, 2024, UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends joined us for the latest CAFe Speaker Series.
Abstract:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was a wake-up call for cultural heritage professionals worldwide. For several decades, cultural institutions have engaged in digitization of cultural artifacts, in light of the invasion, however, it became clear that the servers on which these digital objects are stored are as vulnerable as the buildings which house the analog originals. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is a global grassroots initiative of more than 1,500 volunteers which formed as a response to the invasion to support the digital preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. SUCHO began as an emergency web-archiving effort, preserving more than 50TB of cultural data from over 5,000 websites of Ukrainian museums, libraries, and archives.
In this talk, Anna Kijas, co-founder of SUCHO, shares the story of SUCHO and explores how this initiative drew together a community of activists with a shared vision of ensuring that digitized and born-digital cultural heritage is pre-emptively protected in the future. She focuses on how SUCHO centered community and care, promoted collaboration, and developed relationships with Ukrainian institutions and cultural heritage professionals. Much as World War II laid the groundwork for robust cultural heritage protection organizations that still operate today, the global cultural heritage community can learn from the invasion of Ukraine to plan for a more resilient future for digital cultural heritage protection that centers concepts of community and care.
Bio:
Anna Kijas is Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship and Head of the Lilly Music Library at Tufts University. She is a co-founder of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Her research interests include exploring the affordances and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical (music) research, the application of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access research and publishing, and the use of minimal computing. Anna also researches and writes about nineteenth century music topics with a focus on gender, women, and performance criticism and reception. Her publications include a book entitled The Life and Music of Teresa Carreño (1853-1917): A Guide to Research, and open-access projects, including Documenting Teresa Carreño centered around Carreño’s performance career (1863-1917) and Rebalancing the Music Canon that aims to make musical works by historically marginalized and un(der)-represented people more discoverable, decenter the musical canon, and make data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive. Anna is currently the Administrative Chair of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and during 2019-2023 she served as an Executive Council Representative of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH). Her work and contributions have been recognized with awards including the A. Ralph Papakhian Special Achievement Award (MLA), European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award 2023, Society of American Archivists Council Resolution, Walter Gerboth Award (MLA), as well as intramural awards and grants.