Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) are host to cultural treasures and historic records but face inherent challenges maintaining accessibility and traceability in their legacy collections. Rolling COVID-19 lockdowns over the past three years (2020-2023) have limited access to primary materials while user expectation of digital access to collections has grown. With renewed digital access, however, comes new challenges in authentication and provenance tracking: collection digitization and monitoring of cultural artefacts introduces new lines of work for institutions already constrained by budgets and staffing. Building upon our previous exploration of this topic, “NFTs: Tulip Mania or Digital Renaissance?”, we present a design solution for tracking and monitoring GLAM collection objects via a hardware controller with Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that interfaces with a trusted and flexible digital twin ledger architecture, selected from our analysis of database and private ledger technologies. We conclude by outlining the physical threat model for this design: future work will expand this model to include digital (cyber) threats to GLAM collection objects and investigate credentialed queries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the viewpoint of national archives on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, discover their activities in relation to the application of these technologies, and analyse their thoughts on how these technologies can play a role in the preservation of records’ trustworthiness. A survey method was adopted in the study. The survey consisted of 18 questions about national archives’ attitude and actions in relation to application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. The survey was sent to the 194 national archives listed in the Directory of National Archives. Eighteen responses have been acquired which, while low, provides initial insights into how national archives are responding to these technologies. This study has three hypotheses. The first one is “blockchain technology will change archiving practices “, the second one is “the trustworthiness of digital records can be preserved better with blockchain technology”, and the last one is “national archives are reluctant to implement blockchain networks that use tradable crypto-assets”. According to the results obtained from the survey, the first hypothesis has not been verified. The second hypothesis is likely, as national archives that are keen to adopt blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, but a majority of the archives are hesitant to adopt these technologies for archiving, suggesting that the third and final hypothesis might also true, though the reasons for national archives’ reluctance to adopt these technologies could be more varied than originally hypothesized. This study is one of the first systemic analyses of the viewpoint and activities of national archives on blockchain and distributed technologies.

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) institutions have begun to sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of works from their collections following the $69.3 M USD record sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s auction house on March 11, 2021. But many open questions exist about whether NFTs are beneficial or harmful for such institutions from financial, regulatory, and environmental perspectives. In this paper, we aim to unpack what NFTs are within the context of tokenomics and Ethereum standards development by providing an overview of notable NFTs and selling platforms before discussing the pros and cons of their use in GLAM institutions and exploring open research challenges through the lens of Computational Archival Science. Methodologies for the creation (minting) and purchase of NFTs are provided, emphasizing NFTs’ record keeping abilities, while also highlighting their inherent vulnerabilities, particularly with regards to the now-infamous broken link problem and its implications for provenance tracking and authenticity.