In response to the accelerated destruction of cultural institutions since October 2023, a team at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit is leveraging technology to build a distributed digital archive, creating a repository of Palestinian memory designed to withstand physical and digital threats. The project aims to safeguard a national heritage that has been systematically looted and destroyed for decades.
Quick Facts
- Contains over 500,000 digitized records.
- Built as an “unlootable” open-source platform.
- Uses distributed backups stored globally for resilience.
An ‘Unlootable Archive’ Against Erasure
The initiative was born from a pressing need to counteract what the museum’s general director, Amer Shomali, describes as a continuous battle to erase Palestinian culture. “Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites,” said Shomali. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory—it’s not something theoretical.”
With an estimated 80% of the country’s national collections either looted, destroyed, or under Israeli control, the museum team began building its digital repository in 2018. The goal was to create something that could not be seized or erased, preserving history beyond the walls of any single building.
“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive, which is an unlootable archive,” Shomali explained.
From Door-Knocking to a Global Database
What started with team members visiting families across the West Bank to scan old photographs, letters, and personal documents has evolved into one of the region’s most significant digital preservation projects. The archive now holds more than half a million digitized items, including identification papers, diaries, maps, and films, many collected directly from families and saved from being lost forever.
A dedicated team of three full-time staff manages digitization, metadata, and research, supported by volunteers. The project is funded by diaspora donations and partnerships with institutions like the University of California and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The team is even developing a bot capable of reading Ottoman Arabic to help process older historical records.
“We always try to respect the privacy, dignity, and rights of the people represented in the records,” said Mohammad Rabae, who is responsible for the digitization process. “We are not only creating digital files; we are helping to preserve historical evidence and cultural heritage.”
Building for Cyber and Physical Resilience
The archive’s architecture is designed for survival. Multiple copies of the entire database are stored in different locations around the world, creating a distributed system that ensures the collection’s persistence even if one server is compromised or destroyed.
This resilience is frequently tested. “We have different backups, but we keep getting cyberattacks on the website,” Shomali noted. “Almost every month, we get attacked, and the website goes down, and we reinitiate it based on one of the backups we have.”
He added, “We can’t protect it from being hacked, but we can protect it from disappearing.”
A Living Archive for Global Exhibitions
Beyond preservation, the museum is focused on access. One initiative transforms the archive into an “exhibition in a box,” allowing anyone to download high-resolution materials and stage their own exhibition on Palestine anywhere in the world. This project has been displayed over 260 times from Japan to San Francisco.
The archive is also a critical resource for international artists and curators. Leyya Mona Tawil used its collections for her San Francisco exhibition, My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Music Online Exhibition.
“It’s not just a history of music, it’s not just a collection of past objects; it’s a living archive that represents a society that is under threat,” Tawil said, reflecting on the archive’s profound impact.
For Shomali, every digitized file and backup is an act of resistance. “Having the digital archive is a way of protecting our memory,” he said, referencing the late poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We who are able to remember are able to liberate ourselves.”
About The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive is an open-source, unlootable digital platform dedicated to preserving and sharing Palestinian history and culture. Launched in 2018 by the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, it contains over 500,000 digitized photographs, documents, films, and other records collected from families and institutions. The archive is designed to be a resilient, distributed repository accessible to researchers, artists, and the public worldwide.
Source: WIRED
