What will remain of us after we have gone? What will future generations know about our legacy? At this rate - a lot. They’ll have a lot more than relics and parchment to work on. 

Humanity produces a lot of data. 402 terabytes of data are estimated to be created each day. Each and every one of our personal lives are more faithfully recorded by history every passing year. Future historians will know what we did on any given Sunday. Future museums will host virtual reality re-enactments of events reconstructed from the data-points emitted by our personalized AIs, sensors, cameras, and smartphones on a colossal scale daily. It’s not just a flight of fancy: the data we produce on industrial scales records us for posterity, and with many of our daily thoughts already being processed by AI, future generations will replay our lives in technicolor.

Museums in the Digital Era

The world’s culture is no longer stored in museums, but on server farms. Nevertheless, museums are still the closest we have to official memory institutions. They too have had to react to the digital age, and to capture, store and share culture in new terms. That transition has been painful. Thousands of unique computer systems and proprietary software legacies mean that digital memory is more vulnerable to attack than it should be. In the information age where we fight the war for truth, these institutions are more valuable than ever before, and better data management systems can help them flourish in an age of strife. It helps society build resilient cultural monuments in the physical and the digital.

Museums are more than just physical archives. Virtual tours, online exhibits, multimedia storytelling and interactive experiences are the norm, all producing sensitive, valuable and highly fragmented data. The British Museum’s virtual exhibits, for example, must coordinate between content servers, multilingual guides, and global access compliance. It’s not unusual for a museum's digital delivery systems to be operating on distinct hardware and software.

Fragmented Collections 

There’s also collection data - databases about art, condition reports, loanee agreements, asset digitization, visitor interaction. These are fragmented. It makes organization difficult and expensive, while collaborations with external parties are even worse to handle, with inter-institutional data handoffs often relying on insecure file transfer or inconsistent schema exports that can lead to partial corruption and loss of data. Museums are keepers of artifacts which are priceless and whose provenance is often sensitive, with ownership history and restitution dispute common. Without proper data lineage and revocation support, institutions may accidentally violate ICOM or UNESCO conventions. With public funding also commonly involved, museums have enormous responsibilities around their data which carries both reputational and legal risk.

Preserving history is more complex than ever, and that means preserving data with it. Audio recordings, transcripts, custody metadata, testimonies, location tags, time stamps - the provenance lifecycle of this data will be essential to future historians wanting to know the stuff about us. Yet that data is often scattered, siloed and fragile. Stored on third party servers, accessible through proprietary software - or even hardware. Archive media sometimes needs specific legacy hardware to read, like MiniDiscs or obsolete RAID formats.

Data Lost to History

Every day we lose billions of data points to the sands of time. Cultural legacies are on corporate machines. There are no standard data pipelines or long term hosting guarantees.  Cultural projects running on grants switch off their servers when the funding dries up, or even worse. One UN-backed archival site lost a decade’s worth of recordings overnight due to a fire. Cultural memory really is that fragile. Differing data formats and databasing by different projects precludes interoperability, and the problem is exacerbated by the cross-border international cultural collaboration that often defines these projects.

Then there is the question of ownership. Who ‘owns’ our cultural history? Who edits, exports, and protects it? Institutions digitizing artifacts can lose control of that usage downstream. Sometimes, through conflict, unstable government, or corporate takeover, collections can be lost or privatized entirely. In the war of truth, who gets to tell the story matters. Our colonial history - one that persists in museum institutions today - is the very evidence of that.

Sovereign and Resilient Cultural Data

We need, then, a blend of cultural sovereignty, cultural resilience, and cultural interoperability. We need sovereign, resilient, and interoperable data. Source Network benefits all these disparate sectors of human accomplishment because in the modern era they are all improved - both in principles and practicality - by better data practices and better data management. It helps developers build tools that work offline and sync when needed. It lets organizations and different parties - like museums working on cross-border cultural projects - collaborate with their data without compromising control. 

Source Network allows data to be embedded with access control, audit trails and the ability to transform schema by design. That’s as useful for a museum trying to unify their collection data across platforms as it is for a decentralized energy grid to share their load data. SourceHub can help auditability and integrity of digital artifacts and records of physical custody, with metadata immutability and verifiable logs strengthening provenance chains and legal documentation. DefraDB can enable edge-first syncing and offline access for cultural institutions while retaining conflict-free collaboration: a museum in Nairobi can collaborate with a partner archive in Lisbon and share sensitive data along strict compliance obligations. Museums can sync collection data across stakeholders and preserve their institutional control and legal compliance. Developers building these cultural tools - be it catalogs, storytelling media, record-keeping systems, curator logs, researcher access - can build in sovereignty by default, rather than trying to bolt it on later. 

Distribute Legacy to Take Back Control

It’s also a major step towards proper decentralized administration of cultural heritage. Some things are too valuable to be stored only using centralized apparatus, particularly when that apparatus leaves such sensitive data vulnerable to attack, modification, or censorship. No one person should decide what stories get to be told. Cultural memory should include everyone, and decentralized management, access, and administration of that memory would be a powerful step in helping preserve our history for generations to come. Cryptographic preservation of rights, access, ownership, control and - perhaps most crucially - traceability of that history gives us all a stake in the society we create. Source Network’s tools means developers working in any sector can deliver data management for their institutions, ensuring interoperability across disparate infrastructures, and helping them tell their own stories far into a future our children and grandchildren will witness, built on an Open Web which gives them control.