A look at an international group of 1,300 librarians, historians, and teachers that is using open source tools and Slack to back up Ukraine's digital archives
In early March, two weeks into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Carrie Pirmann stumbled upon a website dedicated to Ivan Mazepa … Tweets: @internetarchive and @jrosenworcel Tweets: @internetarchive : 🇺🇦Glad to help: “Buildings, bridges, & monuments aren't the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war...the country's digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation's servers.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Jessica Rosenworcel / @jrosenworcel : Praise the librarians. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks into Russia's invasion, Carrie Pirmann's chance encounter with a website about Ivan Mazepa grew into a Slack-coordinated effort by 1,300 librarians, historians, and teachers to copy Ukraine's digital archives onto foreign servers before bombs and cyberattacks erase them. The Internet Archive publicly joined in, and FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel praised the volunteers — an unusual moment of a regulator celebrating ad hoc preservation work.
The effort extends a longer argument in the corpus: since at least 2018, archivists have explored tamper-proof, government-resistant storage because digital history is only as durable as the servers holding it. What was theoretical then became operational here — and the June 2022 reporting on how US tech companies, NATO intelligence, and Ukrainian hackers blunted Russian cyber operations shows civilian-volunteer networks were already part of Ukraine's defense.
First-order effects
- Ukraine's poems, archives, and pictures now exist as copies outside the country, held by the Internet Archive and volunteer-run repositories, so their survival no longer depends on servers inside the war zone.
- Slack and open-source backup tools are suddenly wartime infrastructure for cultural institutions, with the Internet Archive acting as the de facto destination of record.
Second-order effects
- The model pressures institutional archives elsewhere: the British Library's £6M-£7M recovery from an October cyberattack shows what losing a single repository costs, giving other national libraries a concrete reason to adopt distributed, off-site replication rather than centralized holdings.
- The Internet Archive's role as emergency custodian strengthens its standing in its fight with the four major publishers over whether it is a library — a dispute where librarians have already argued the lawsuit threatens digital collection-building.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cultural archives get treated like critical infrastructure: replicated across jurisdictions and volunteer networks, with preservation shifting from institution-owned vaults to federated copies no single attacker can erase.
- The same dynamic that grew the Internet Archive from 2TB in 1997 to roughly 100PB now points toward preservation capacity being sized not by one organization's budget but by how many independent nodes agree to mirror a nation's records.
The trend: Cultural preservation is moving from centralized institutional vaults toward distributed, volunteer-coordinated replication, with wartime erasure risk accelerating the shift.