Paper Short Abstract:

This paper demonstrates how personal digital archiving and decentralized preservation bring to light " undesired" pasts and enable long-term preservation through decentralized peer-to-peer network, which builds a memory system resistant to centralized control, failure, censorship, or destruction.

Paper Abstract:

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project “From Ruin to Resilience: Digital Revival of the National Library of Serbia (NLS),” supported in part by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW). Using the case of the NLS, established in 1832 and destroyed in a Luftwaffe air raid in 1941, the paper asks how new digital practices can be used to mitigate suppression, manipulation, and destruction of knowledge, which is pervasive today both in warzones and in culture wars focused on controlling access to knowledge through book bans, censorship, or lawsuits.

We focus on two types of digital practices—personal digital archiving (PDA) and decentralized preservation.

Rooted in social history as history from the bottom up, as well as in cultural theory and postcolonial studies, PDA focuses on various non-deposited sources and ego-documents, highlighting "undesired" pasts that never found their way to the official records. The digitally reimagined NLS seeks to undo “selective tradition” (Williams 1961/1971) by empowering individuals and communities to contribute materials to the digital library in a participatory knowledge form of public humanities.

Furthermore, we seek to enable long-term preservation through FFDW’s decentralized peer-to-peer network, which is based on InterPlantery File System for data storing, sharing, and preservation. By providing data mirroring, an immutable public record of all actions, and strong anonymity, the network promotes decentralized architecture that prevents any individual, corporation, government, or other actor from centralizing control over architecture, protocols, or content, and builds a memory system resistant to centralized failure, censorship, or destruction.