Norway Opening ‘Doomsday’ Library Archive for Digital Information Preservation

Norway is home to the Global seed vault but it will also soon be home to the largest ‘doomsday’ library archive in the world which aims to digitally preserve all of the most sensitive and irreplaceable data in digital form for future generations. The ‘Arctic World Archive’ will also be built inside a mine in Longyearbyen on the island of Svalbard, near the Global seed vault due to its remote location and relatively disaster-proof environment. That same mine, Gruve no. 3 is actually the initial location for the Global Seed vault when it was first started in 1984.

All the data stored will be kept offline but will be accessible on demand if needed; there is a high-speed internet connection in the vault via optical fiber connection. Like the Global seed vault, the arctic world archive is Nuclear and EMP-proof so even if all hell breaks loose and the world’s economies collapse, the data stored in there will be safe. Being deep inside the arctic mountains with permafrost and located in an archipelago that has been declared demilitarized by over 42 nations makes this the most secure place in the world to build a vault.

The project is the work of Piql and Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani, a state-owned Norwegian coal mining company. Piql has developed the technology for the secure storage and long-term digital preservation which can securely preserve data for 1000+ years on their PiqlFilm. Norway, Brazil and Mexico are the first nations who have signed up to physically store all their most important, sensitive data and records in the archive. Any country, authority, organization, company or individual in the world can store data in there and expect it to be secure.