Memory Savers Internship | Mykyta Bilyi
13.12.2023
In July of this year, an intern, Mykyta Bilyi, joined the team of the Urban Media Archive at the Center for Urban History.
Mykyta's internship was part of the Memory Savers program, which is conducted jointly by the Center for Digital History and SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) and funded by the EVZ Foundation.
During the first three months, Mykyta was digitizing two collections: his own family collection, which he later transferred to the Urban Media Archive, and the collection of the Lviv Bus Factory.
The LBF collection includes about a thousand paper materials (envelopes, printed photographs, and documents) and several thousand film materials, so working with it took most of the internship. Mykyta scanned, digitized, and described each item separately.
"Working with old materials is quite laborious. Given the condition of some materials, which can be more than 50 years old, the digitization process must be as careful and accurate as possible in order not to damage or completely ruin the item. The internship at the archive allows me to learn to be as careful and attentive as possible during the digitization process and the further organization of the digitized materials," Mykyta shares.
In September, Mykyta took part in the SlideDay event held at the Center as part of the European Heritage Days. He digitized several dozen glass slides so that visitors could have digital copies of family history at home. During the almost six months of his internship, Mykyta also attended numerous seminars and lectures at the Center for Urban History.
Today, Mykyta continues his internship at the Urban Media Archive and is working on his own research, which focuses on preserving evidence of the experience of forced laborers in Germany during World War II.
We are glad to have Mykyta as part of our team, and we are also grateful that we were able to join the Memory Savers initiative.
Mykyta is a graduate of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University. During his studies at the university, he interned at the “Territory of Terror” Memorial Museum, where he described photographs and transcribed interviews for the oral history project #unheard. In 2023, during an internship at the NGO After the Silence, he developed his own exhibition project about the traumatic experience and cultural memory of the deportation and forced relocation of Lemkos and Crimean Tatars. His research interests lie in the study of cultural memory, trauma, and the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experiences.
Mykyta Bilyi
Urban Media Archive of Center for Urban History consists of digitized or digitally created visual, audiovisual, and audio resources that show the city and tell about urban life in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th-21st centuries. The tasks of the archive are to collect, store, research, make available, and popularize collections and materials that are often overlooked by state archival collections. The Urban Media Archive is also a place for analyzing archival data and rethinking the role of the archive in society as a whole.
Credits
Cover Image: Lis Bobrova
Gallery: Lis Bobrova