Blockchain technology is poised to influence archives in significant ways over the next ten years, especially in areas related to authenticity, access control, preservation, and provenance tracking.
Blockchain technology is one way the GLAMR industry – Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Records – could meet authenticity and access requirements for digitised records and fulfil legal and social expectations about the originality and reliability of digitised content.
Blockchain is a “distributed ledger technology”, essentially an authentication database shared and reproduced among nodes in a network. It can record every change or access to an archival document, ensuring a tamper-proof history of its custody and modifications. This is crucial for born-digital records or digitized versions of physical archives.
In libraries, permissionless metadata blockchains (like Ethereum) have been trialled as a means of overcoming the centralisation of records and the traceability of modifications. They work by adapting private and public keys to differentiate authoritative peers and general users. This decentralised preservation reduces the risk of data loss at single points
For cultural heritage, archives and memory institutions, the focus has been on permissioned blockchains (like Hyperledger) that allow digital repositories to demonstrate providence through a decentralised chain of custody that verifies ownership, maintaining the “authenticity, reliability, integrity and useability” required by records management standards. Blockchain-anchored metadata seems a likely development in the near future.
A feasibility study conducted by the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey and the UK’s National Archives demonstrates how blockchain technology could contribute to the process of verifying the integrity of the digital record in memory institutions and archives. The pilot, dubbed “Archangel”, demonstrated how blockchain could be used to prove that archives have not been altered or censored.
The 24-month Archangel feasibility study aimed at enhancing the integrity and trustworthiness of digital public records using blockchain, by creating immutable digital fingerprints of archival documents to detect tampering or accidental modifications.To verify the authenticity of digital archives and maintain their immutability, blockchain technology sits on top of a “data lake”, the digital repository holding critical archival records requiring authentication. The blockchain itself holds minimal data, only what is needed to verify the checksum of the digital objects and aid their searchability.
While some have proposed that blockchain might have saved the Library of Alexandria, or could preserve archives in wartime, its use may not be so radical nor so immune from political upheaval. It may however, present a way that the authenticity and reliability of digitised and born-digital records could be verified in the future.
Suggestions for further reading
Bhatia, S. & Wright de Hernandez, A. (2019). Blockchain is already here: What does that mean for records management and archives? Journal of Archival Organization, 16(1), 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332748.2019.1655614
Collomosse, J, Bui, T, Brown, A, Sheridan, J, Green, A, Bell, M, Fawcett, J, Higgins, J, & O. Thereaux (2018), Archangel: Trusted archives of digital public documents. Proceedings ACM Document Engineering. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08342.pdf
CVSSP Research. (2019, June 20). ARCHANGEL project-trusted digital archives[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKCdKo6rQXw
Green, J, Bell, M, Sheridan, J, Collomosse, J, Bui, T, Brown, A, Fawcett, J, Thereaux, O. & Tennison, J. (2018). Using Blockchain to Engender Trust in Public Digital Archives, 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation, Sep 2018, Boston, USA. https://osf.io/rbyzu/download
Kaur, A., Sharma, R., Mishra, P., Sinhababu, A., & Chakravarty, R. (2022). Visual research discovery using connected papers: A use case of blockchain in libraries. The Serials Librarian, 83(2), 186–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2022.2142722
Lo Duca, A, Bacciu, C. & A. Marchetti. (2019). The Use of Blockchain for Digital Archives: a comparison between Ethereum and Hyperledger. DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9959
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/9959/10754
Rubel, D. (2019). No need to ask: Creating permissionless blockchains of metadata records. Information Technology and Libraries, 38(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i2.10822
Standards Australia. (2017). Information and documentation – Records management, Part 1: Concepts and principles (AS ISO 15489.1:2017). SAI Global. https://rb.gy/r9xl63
Tonelli, E. (2022, May 12). How blockchain archives can change how we record history in wartime. Cointelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-blockchain-archives-can-change-how-we-record-history-in-wartime
Tonelli, E. (2021, August 15). How blockchain archives could have saved the Library of Alexandria. Cointelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-blockchain-could-have-saved-the-library-of-alexandria
