How do Palestinians build an indelible digital archive?

“We created this platform, The digital archive of the Palestine Museum“It is an archive that cannot be plundered,” Al-Shamali explains.

What began as simple knocks on doors – visiting families in the West Bank and asking permission to scan old photographs, letters and documents – has evolved into one of the most ambitious digital preservation projects in the region.

The open source archive now contains more than 500,000 digital photographs, identity papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and may be lost forever.

The mission of the Palestinian Museum is preservation and access: protecting Palestinian history and making it available to those who cannot visit Palestine.

Behind the archive is a team of three full-time staff dedicated solely to digitization, metadata and research, supported by a wider network of volunteers. It is funded through diaspora donations and partnerships with the University of California and… Gerda Henkel FoundationThe project includes extensive indexing, translations and proofreading. The museum is also exploring a robot capable of reading Ottoman Arabic to help process historical records.

This effort reflects a broader shift in how vulnerable communities use technology — not just to preserve culture, but to build resilient, distributed archives that can outlast war, displacement, and physical destruction.

For Shomali, the archive allows Palestinians to reclaim ownership of their history. “Suddenly, you start to have this network, this network of information and data, and it allows you to rewrite history, but interestingly, it’s not a state archive.”

The museum has also taken steps to ensure the archive can survive digital attacks and even physical destruction. Multiple copies of the archive are stored around the world, creating a distributed system designed to prevent collections from disappearing completely.

“We have different backups, but we are constantly exposed to cyberattacks on the website,” Al-Shamali says. “About every month, we get attacked, the website goes down, and we restart it based on one of our backups.”

“We can’t protect it from being hacked, but we can protect it from disappearing.”

The distributed nature of the archive means that Palestinian history no longer exists in a single building or on a single server. Even if one copy disappears, the other copies remain.

One initiative turned the archive into what Shomali described as “a gallery in a box, IKEA style.” Users can download and print exhibition materials and organize their own exhibitions on Palestine anywhere in the world, regardless of budget. The project has been presented more than 260 timesFrom Japan to San Francisco, translated into five languages.

The archive has also become a resource for artists and curators abroad. In May 2026, artist and curator Lea Mona Tawil used her collections to create My Name is Palestine: Echoes from the Electronic Music Exhibition at the Palestinian Museum In San Francisco.

“Most of them came out in tears and said, ‘Thank you,’” Tawil says of the reception he gave visitors to the exhibition.

Acknowledging the enormous size of the archive, Tawil says she only had access to “part of what the museum contains.” But even that had a profound impact on her as an artist and on her audiences: “It’s not just a history of music, it’s not just a collection of past things; it’s a living archive that represents a community that is under threat.”