November 18, 2016

A Holodomor information outreach project continues to deliver

More

Screenshot of a page from the website www.holodomorct.org.

During this year’s peak period for school reports, March through June, the Holodomor information website www.holodomorct.org received approximately 75,000 visits. Was it 75,000 people in four months? Or more likely, 10,000 to 15,000 who came back multiple times because they kept finding things worth returning to?

In either case, the growing popularity of the website for users throughout the English-speaking world is a telling indicator.

There is obvious interest and a very real need for an online guide to Holodomor resources that are authentic; comprehensible to the general public and students of varying ages and backgrounds; that meet today’s educational standards; and are readily accessible to a social media-savvy population.

As constrained as it is by its bare-bones website platform, www.holodomorct.org has strived since its beginnings in 2007 to meet that need both by content and strategic design.

In addition to offering a “Facts” outline, the website continually builds its list of carefully selected resources, which now stands at well over 200 items. With emphasis on including materials accessible online, two-thirds of the entries are linked to online content, such as curriculum units and PowerPoint presentations, Harvard’s MAPA projects (the digital atlas of Ukraine program), dozens of articles, quality video content and much more.

Educators and students can connect directly to primary-source materials, such as numerous audio and/or video or written transcriptions that present survivor and witness testimony. The website also links to the entire U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine hearings, which can be read online in a very stable and easy-to-navigate format, the online congressional resolutions regarding the Holodomor; decrees by the Soviet Politburo and other documents in English translation that reveal the deliberate enactment of measures to crush the people of Ukraine via starvation; and other legal documents.

Many important works on the Holodomor, however, are not available online; therefore, the website lists these items with sufficient detail so that they may be readily located in libraries or purchased. These include specific chapters about the Holodomor found in numerous works by prominent historians and genocide scholars, as well as articles in academic journals and subscription online databases. Several high school-level genocide studies publishers have also included the topic of the Holodomor in their books. Every effort has been made to find and list all such text and media that might be both useful and generally accessible for students, the general public and beginning researchers.

It has been the particular goal of this website to gain and keep the trust of educators by the quality and currency of the resources we present, our understanding of what educators need and the stability of our product. So it was certainly rewarding when the editor of Social Studies Professional had the website listed in its January/February 2015 issue, based on an informal demonstration of the website at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s exhibit booth at the 2014 National Social Studies Conference in Boston.

The website also strives to keep relevant in a dynamic environment. When the Maidan Revolution of Dignity was born in late 2013, the website added a category now linking to numerous online articles that address the connections of the Maidan and the current war in Ukraine with aspects of the Holodomor.

In terms of visual concept, artist and webmistress Natalka Sazonova has created an overall design that shuns sensationalism, that projects our sense of respect for both the victims and the survivors, and promotes our educational mission. Furthermore, Ms. Sazonova had applied smart optimization techniques to get the website visible in the first place. Her initial efforts and consistently increasing user traffic to the website have placed the website as second only to Wikipedia when searching the term “Holodomor” on the most popular search engines.

Originally intended in 2007 to inform the Connecticut public of the upcoming 75th anniversary commemoration plans of the newly formed CT Holodomor Awareness Committee, the website turned into a passionate commitment for Ms. Sazonova. Arriving in the U.S. from Ukraine at the age of 16, she recalled how she was “completely ignorant of the Holodomor… Back then, Soviet schools, as well as newly independent Ukrainian schools didn’t have that subject as a part of their curriculum, and no adult ever talked about it, used to the fact of it being a forbidden subject for so many decades.”

As Ms. Sazonova began to read eyewitness accounts and other materials in order to create the original homepage, “the sheer horror of the magnitude of the injustice” made her determined not to let those “who lost their lives during the Holodomor be forgotten.” The resulting website was well-designed, with a historically accurate outline, a broad selection of survivor and witness testimony, event notifications and a dozen references to further information. Positive feedback poured in from Americans previously unaware of the Holodomor.

When I came on board in 2008, I offered to build up and manage the “Information Links” portion of the website. As an academic librarian with considerable experience in reference research in an online environment, working with Ms. Sazonova proved to be an ideal partnership in terms of skills, as well as our shared passion to promote Holodomor awareness. We intend to continue our “labor of love” indefinitely, continually updating, continuing to apply what we learn from educators such as our committee chair, Lidia Choma; Valentina Kuryliw, director of education with the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium; and many others. We are continually innovating and upgrading.

The website arose from humble beginnings – offering few options for design, no indexing or internal cross-linking and no interconnectivity with other social media. Although the website has reached a wider than expected audience in spite of these constraints, it is time for us to move to the next level in order to provide a much better informational experience for our users, and also to allow website users to share their experience and recommendations across social media.

Ms. Sazonova has selected a new platform; however, transferring our data-rich website will be a formidable task that must be done in a very short span of time. Ms. Sazonova is determined to do this herself. We have operated from the outset as a volunteer, unfunded project. The transfer, however, is a one-time job that is certainly deserving of a subsidy.

What keeps us going, you may ask? Perhaps the many notes, like this one that came a couple of months ago from a college student in South Dakota:  “Hello my name is Emily…  and I am contacting you in hope that you could help me in citing your website. The information you had on Holodomor was some of the best and easiest to understand… Thank you for having such a comprehensive and informative website.”

The site www.holodomorct.org is always a work in progress: There are several new titles that need to be added to the Information Links, and a page or two “under construction.” We are looking to add new features. Like all dynamic websites, it is always in flux! We welcome your visits and we welcome your comments.

Lana Y. Babij ([email protected]) is content manager for www.holodomorct.org.

Comments are closed.