Exploring the risks to our cultural heritage

Public collections, such as libraries, museums and archives, collect and preserve our written and material cultural heritage, thus enabling the constant development of human science and culture. They collect objects and documents that fall within the scope of their collection regulations. In most countries around the world, publishers send all their publications to the national library as part of the legal deposit service. Museums and archives take care of the protection of the cultural heritage that comes to them or is discovered by them, but unfortunately, from time to time, irreplaceable collections are destroyed, and in this case a piece of human history disappears. Think of the destruction of the Museion in Alexandria, the tragic fate of the Library of Princess Anna Amalia in Weimar, or the unique history of the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which burned down in 2018. So we see that our existing collections are extremely vulnerable, and how a slice of our cultural heritage is waning as humanity progresses in its own history. My aim is to give a complete picture of the risks to the integrity of our cultural heritage. My work can also be considered the next stage of a previous research. I have previously examined what will be the fate of personal digital legacies and whether current technology can truly preserve our digitally stored cultural heritage in the long run, or whether the 21st century will be remembered as the digital dark age in the perspective of some people. In my present research, I extend the topic of personal digital legacies to preserve the written cultural heritage of humanity, which includes more than just digitally existing data. Closely related to my current research topic are two other projects: the Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Risk Register, and the IFLA Preservation and Conservation Centers. A significant problem with the subject is that public collections are only able to preserve what they know existed, as there are still a lot of unexplored manuscripts. That is why one of the aims of my research is to examine the possibility of putting community knowledge at the service of exploring local history manuscripts - that is, what tools we have to map and preserve our written cultural heritage