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.

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.