Historypin Research:

Modeling Sustainable Futures: Exploring Decentralized Digital Storage for Community-Based Archives

The Challenge

Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people and they mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions. But while these archives continue to collect and preserve these histories, many of them face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities because of a lack of funding opportunities and other ongoing resources common in larger institutions.

Our Approach

Shift Collective is dedicated to supporting these organizations in a variety of ways. In 2023, we began a three year collaborative research and development project supported by Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.

In the first year, the project will explore the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of small cultural memory organizations who steward the most important historical collections for diverse communities around the world. The project will focus on exploring affordable and sustainable digital storage and how a decentralized storage network might address particular stated needs for the tens of thousands of these organizations. Our goal is to design an early prototype for community-centered, non-extractive, affordable, and accessible long-term storage, using our Historypin platform as the front-end interface.

In the second year, the team will create a prototype centered on 5 community-based archives and their digitial collections, in collaboration with invited institutional partners. In the third year the team will explore the possibility of scaling the project together with 3 digital networks of community-based archives.

Year 1 Outputs and Reports (free to download and reuse, CC-BY-SA):

Download the outputs from year one of our research, including:

  • a 2 page tech-brief to inform community-based archives about the basics of decentralized web technologies and implications for how it provides potential for digital storage and verification of authenticity

  • a summary presentation deck of our main research and findings from year 1

  • the full report of our findings from the first year of research, including more background on decentralized storage, concerns from community-based archives, risk and benefit analysis for different types of CBAs, and our proposal for harm reduction model for further exploring the technology.

2 Page Tech Brief about the Decentralized Web

Summary presentation of research and findings from Year 1

Full report summarizing our research findings and next steps

See Zakiya Collier's presentation about this research at the International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference, April 26 2024, Paris.

A special thanks to the team of community-based archives practitioners and technologists who joined our research team for this project:

Our Research Faculty (Year 1):

Our Technical Advisors (Year 1):

  • Ed Summers, Stanford University

Our Institutional Partners (Year 2/3):

  • To be determined. Learn more if you’re interested.

 

Funding

 

Join the Research:

 

Related Research:

Year 2 Working Strands

1. Historypin Platform

Shift Leads: Lynette/Jon

Activities:

  • Determine tech partner

  • Strategy, timing & scope of work

  • Ensuring there is a pathway to decentralized storage

3. Community-Based Archives Collections

Shift Leads: Erin/Bergis

Activities:

  • Identify and work with 5 community-based archives

  • Support them in digitization and planning process

  • Support them in creating 10 collections on Historypin

  • Document needs, processes, issues

  • Walk through decentralized storage MVP and test viability

 

2. Historypin Preservation Prototype Design

Shift Lead: Jon

Activities:

  • Work with advisors to develop “minimal viable product” based on risk assessment & harm reduction model developed in year 1

  • Draft technical architecture design, requirements and threat models of several options, including IPFS, LOCKSS, and Historypin/Internet Archive APIs

  • Test and refine with community-based archives

 

4. Education and Dissemination

Shift Lead: Zakiya

Activities:

  • Disseminate Year 1 findings and materials

  • Assist in year 2 writeup and make dissemination plan

  • Organize and host quarterly public calls

 

Announcing the Year 2 Community-Based Archives Partners

We are partnering with 6 community-based archive partners to create 10 digital collections each, helping us to evaluate how likely they would be to use a version of Historypin with a long-term preservation option according to an ethical framework developed in a previous phase of research and their own organizational needs.

Year 2 Outputs and Reports

Coming soon…