The museum keeps the actual images safe for posterity. But what about digital images? Filecoin Foundation Today, we are stepping up to preserve cultural assets in digital format using decentralized network technology.
The Filecoin Foundation (FF) today announced the addition of new cultural datasets to the Filecoin Network from prominent organizations including the Smithsonian Institution, Flickr Foundation, Internet Archive, and MIT Open Learning.
With more than 500,000 culturally significant digital artifacts currently protected on its network, Filecoin is redefining data preservation in an era where the integrity, provenance, and robustness of information are more important than ever, Filecoin said.
Modern innovation is driven by data. It is an essential component for the development of entire industries, including artificial intelligence (AI). However, as our dependence on data increases, so do the risks of relying on centralized storage systems. natural disaster, human errorand blackout The company noted that this could jeopardize access to important information and potentially threaten cultural and historical preservation.
Decentralized networks like Filecoin are revolutionizing the way data is stored, viewed, and shared. Filecoin uses cryptographic proof to ensure the integrity of your data and ensures that your files remain intact and unchanged over time. Filecoin distributes data across a decentralized global network, ensuring that information remains accessible even when part of the network goes offline.
The new dataset uploaded to Filecoin includes a variety of cultural and educational resources, from the earliest audio recordings in history to vast repositories of photos that capture the essence of human history. By leveraging distributed storage infrastructure, these organizations are pioneering a new era of digital preservation and ensuring that valuable resources are protected for future generations. The new datasets from the network are:
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is working to upload approximately 300 digitized sound recordings of Alexander Graham Bell to IPFS and Filecoin. Bell, famous for patenting the first practical telephone in 1876, also pioneered the field of recorded sound.
The experimental recordings made at his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. from 1881 to 1889 are some of the first sound recordings ever made. The extant collection, which consists of about 300 records, was considered unplayable until new technology in the 21st century made it possible to listen to them.
The Flickr Foundation is offering the 1,000 most viewed photos from Flickr Commons, a 17-year-old program focused on making our cultural institutions’ photo collections more accessible to the public. Launched in 2008 with the Library of Congress, Flickr Commons now contains more than 2 million images from 120 cultural institutions around the world. The Flickr Commons 1k collection includes photos from the National Archives, NASA, Library of Congress, and the George Eastman Museum.
The Internet Archive will upload web archives ending in 2024 to the Filecoin network, along with crawl data ending in previous periods. Since 2008, the End of Term Web Archive project has been capturing and archiving U.S. government websites from the end of a president’s term. This project captures websites at three separate points during the transition period: before the election, after the election, and after the inauguration. Internet Archive Canada plans to support archiving following Canada’s federal transition in 2025.
MIT Open Learning and OpenCourseWare (OCW) have uploaded selected content to the Filecoin network, including the following foundational courses: single variable calculus and Introduction to AlgorithmsClimate and sustainability topics such as: Urban energy systems and policies and D Lab EnergySupports institutional needs for alternative channels for robust, tamper-resistant storage and distribution.
Starling Lab recently launched a 22-petabyte Filecoin storage node at the University of Southern California (USC) Library. The initial collections saved include portions of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, including testimonies from survivors of atrocities. numerous photojournalism projects; and 3D/VR scans of historic sites. Starling Lab is an academic research center based at Stanford and USC specializing in ensuring the integrity of historical, legal, and journalism archives.
These organizations are collaborating as follows: Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) is the Filecoin Foundation’s sister non-profit organization working to advance the decentralized web through education, research, and development.
“Our mission is to preserve humanity’s most important information,” Marta Belcher, president and president of the Filecoin Foundation and FFDW, said in a statement. “We are excited to partner with these organizations to permanently preserve culturally important data sets using powerful, distributed storage systems.”
The Filecoin Foundation remains committed to its mission of preserving humanity’s most important information. These new datasets highlight the transformative potential of decentralized technologies for preserving and accessing sensitive information and address the growing importance of data integrity, provenance, and longevity in today’s digital age.
