NewsMakareNovember 20265 min read
A seed vault for human records
Makare is an archive where every document carries its own methodology and says plainly what kind of evidence it is. This post covers why we built it, what goes in, and how you can add to it.
Open the report, 4 pagesDownload the PDFOn the night of 25 August 1992, incendiary shells hit the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Librarians and volunteers carried books out under sniper fire while the building burned. Most of a collection of about 1.5 million volumes was lost.
1.5M
volumes lost in Sarajevo, along with rare books, manuscripts and a century of newspapers and journals.
Six
kinds of evidence. Every record is labelled with one, so a reader knows how much weight to give it.
Fingerprinted
Each record is identified by a hash of its own contents, so a copy found years from now can be checked against the original.
2 to 3 min
to contribute a record, in four steps. The methodology is the step that takes thought.
The premise
Part of what burned in Sarajevo has since been pieced back together from copies foreign scholars had made before the war. Those copies are valuable for one reason: someone can say who made them, from what, and when. A record becomes evidence when it carries its own account of itself. Makare is an archive that refuses to separate the two.
We named it for the Shona word for the distant past, the time of the ancestors. It is live now at makare.3sb.io.
The detail
What it is, and how to add to it
The full post is in the PDF above. These are the parts worth pulling up on their own.