The ARCHANGEL project has been exploring the possibilities offered by distributed ledger technology (commonly known as blockchain) and machine learning, and how they could address the challenges around trust, integrity and authenticity that preserving born-digital material presents.
Between July 2017 and July 2019 we worked with the University of Surrey (Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing), and the UK’s National Archives. Our aim was to collaborate in exploring, developing and prototyping these technologies to underpin trust in digital archives, and the work culminated in the pilot of a system across five countries.