By Heather Allen. Bay City News.
As war continues to ravage Ukraine, Ulia Gosart, an assistant professor at San Jose State University is working to preserve the country's culture.
Assistant Professor Ulia Gosart of the SJSU School of Information and her colleagues have been raising money to purchase equipment and technology to digitize rare books, ethnographic materials, and three-dimensional objects like cultural bedding for the Cherkasy Library in central Ukraine, which it has remained relatively safe during the war.
Gosart, who grew up in Ukraine, trained as a librarian at kyiv University. He said digitizing Ukrainian culture was a practical way to help people who had been displaced by the year-long war.
Gosart and his colleagues started a GoFundMe fundraiser last semester that caught the attention of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online ?SUCHO?, an international volunteer initiative to digitize and preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage that added funds to the efforts of Gosart.
Gosart's fundraiser and SUCHO sent a high-resolution scanner and computers to the Cherkasy Library, which Gosart says is a repository of unique Ukrainian content.
Gosart said hundreds of thousands of war-displaced people have flocked to the Cherkasy region in the past year and the library has been a sanctuary for those refugees.
"Libraries are places where people come to talk and meet and although there was no light there, they use candles," Gosart stressed.
Gosart and his colleagues recently sponsored a children's drawing contest with the Cherkasy Library to help displaced families cope with the trauma of war.
More than 400 Ukrainian children participated in the contest, some drawing pictures reflecting the horror of war and lost childhood, some drawing the strength they saw in their soldiers, many of whom were their parents. Others drew their hopes that Ukraine will rise again or thanked the country's allies.
The winning illustration, "Guardian Angels Near Defenders," drawn by 16-year-old Nazar Shcherbatyuk, is a combination of all of those things.
In it, Ukrainian leaders from the past surround Ukraine's soldiers like ghosts as they fight for their land while the sun shines against fields of sunflowers in the background.
«From the evidential point of view and documenting the war and the ways in which children see it. It is a powerful way to create a memory and a history of the world,” said Gosart.
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