How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased
“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive, which is an unlootable archive,” Shomali explains.
What began with simple door-knocking—visiting families in the West Bank and asking permission to scan old photographs, letters and documents—has grown into one of the most ambitious digital preservation projects in the region.
The open-source archive now contains more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and might otherwise have been lost forever.
The Palestinian Museum’s mission is both preservation and access: to safeguard Palestinian history and make it available to those unable to visit Palestine.
Behind the archive is a team of three full-time staff members dedicated solely to digitization, metadata, and research, supported by a wider network of volunteers. Funded through diaspora donations and partnerships with the University of California and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the project...
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