Safeguarding Research & Culture: Save public data from the digital bookburnings! (WHY2025)

Archives are vulnerable. Modern archival methods are robust, but no archive or institute alone can withstand the threats we are currently facing. Safeguarding Research & Culture (SRC) is creating an alternative infrastructure for archiving and disseminating of cultural heritage & scientific knowledge. We focus on publicly available material under threat of being deleted or altered. We preserve this data using open standards, open-source software, distributed storage and your help! No single archive is permanent, nor large enough to store all of our cultures at risk. Modern archival methods are robust, but no archive or institute alone can withstand the threats we are currently facing. The destruction of knowledge and cultural heritage has happened, and is happening again. Whether it is caused by human action[\[1\]](#fn1) or natural causes.[\[2\]](#fn2). Without our archives we lose knowledge and culture which has a negative impact on our ability to learn, study and innovate. However, digital information can be copied easily and quickly. Safeguarding Research & Culture (SRC) is creating an alternative infrastructure for archiving and disseminating of cultural heritage and scientific knowledge. We seek to preserve cultural memory in a way that traditional archives cannot. Together, we can ensure that our cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage exists in multiple copies, in multiple places, and that no single entity or group of entities can make it all disappear. In this session, we will present why we are doing this, what our approach is and why we need your help. After attending this session, participants will: * Gained an insight into the importance of data to support culture preservation & research purposes * Understand how this project relates to and supplements more “traditional” archiving & preservation infrastructure * Feel empowered to contribute to the project in various ways, including seeding existing datasets, identifying at-risk datasets, downloading & adding at-risk datasets to the swarm and supporting this project in other ways References 1. See for example [NYT: *Health Resources Vanish Following D.E.I. and Gender Orders*](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/health/trump-cdc-dei-gender.html), [Atlantic: *Why Is the Trump Administration Deleting a Paper on Suicide Risk?*](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/heath-science-data-trump/681631/), [Boston Globe: *CDC removal of databases on sexual orientation, gender identity sparks alarm*](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/31/metro/cdc-removes-databases-sexual-orientation-gender-identity/), and [404media: *GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time*](https://www.404media.co/github-is-showing-the-trump-administration-scrubbing-government-web-pages-in-real-time/). [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. See for example [Smithsonian: *Why Brazil’s National Museum Fire Was a Devastating Blow to South America’s Cultural Heritage*](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artifacts-destroyed-brazil-devastating-national-museum-fire-180970194/) and [UN: *Destruction of cultural heritage is an attack on people and their fundamental rights*](https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/10/543912). [↩︎](#fnref2) Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/B8DANE/