Safeguarding Research, Data & Culture — a workshop at UVic Libraries,
27 & 28 August 2026.
Since early 2025, US agencies have removed thousands of web pages and datasets from public view: public health data and environmental records,
cultural heritage materials, and scholarly publications.
The current US administration is not the only government altering, censoring, or disappearing public knowledge. Material that researchers assumed would stay put has turned out to sit one policy decision away from vanishing.
A loose international movement now races to save it. Grassroots projects such as SciOp and Safeguarding Research & Culture work alongside Project SHIELD, funded by the German Research Foundation and hosted at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB Hannover). Their method borrows from peer-to-peer file sharing: spread copies widely enough, and no single deletion erases the record.
On August 27 and 28, four practitioners from that movement come to the Kula: Library Futures Academy. Over two days they will introduce the projects and their work, explain the peer-to-peer technology behind them, and show participants how to contribute in practice — including a hands-on session with SciOp and qBittorrent.
The workshop will provide a rare inside into the complexity of the decentralized but federated approach to safeguarding public knowledge. One session takes up the legal exposure that comes with downloading and redistributing this material, and the ethics of doing so when the knowledge belongs to marginalized communities.
Leading the workshop:
- Lambert Heller — Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover; Project SHIELD; Kula Fellow alumnus
- Lisa Poggel — TIB Hannover, Project SHIELD
- Dr. Julian Fietkau — TIB Hannover, Project SHIELD
- Dr. Laura Carter — OpenLifeSci, UC Berkeley Tech Policy Fellow 2024/25
When: 27 & 28 August, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm both days
Where: Kula Commons (A113), Mearns Centre for Learning – McPherson Library
No technical or conceptual background is required. Partial attendance is
welcome — please register either way, so we can plan for lunch (served
Thursday) and drinks, based on attendance.
Part of Kula’s Truth, Knowledge & Society series, in collaboration with Project
SHIELD and Safeguarding Research & Culture.
Co-funded by UVic Libraries, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB Hannover).
