In a complex world, we stand for shared digital stewardship of assets of culture and knowledge across time and space.
Access to culture and knowledge is a cornerstone of democracy and human rights. For generations, libraries, archives, museums, and related institutions have acted as stewards of this shared inheritance. Today, that institutional responsibility is under increasing strain.
We live in a period of profound instability. Armed conflict, geopolitical fragmentation, and the strategic use of disinformation erode trust at societal scale. Climate change disrupts the environmental and institutional conditions on which preservation depends. At the same time, the digital domain - on which so much of contemporary culture and knowledge now rests - has become a concentrated site of risk.
Digital systems enable unprecedented access and participation, and introduce new vulnerabilities. Cyberattacks have undermined institutional credibility and taken collections of global importance offline. Platform dependence and vendor lock-in increasingly shape what can be preserved and how. Rapid technological change renders organisations outdated at speed, while algorithmic systems steer attention according to the values and interests of economic actors. At the same time, economic concentration and (geo)political pressure challenge digital sovereignty and trust.
In this environment, cultural loss is accelerating: data disappears, metadata is severed from context, access collapses even when bits survive, and algorithms increasingly determine what is visible, valued, or forgotten.
These active climate, (geo)political, and digital threats compound existing institutional challenges such as funding volatility, cross-border legal fragmentation, and skills shortages. Together, they indicate the widening gap between what digital stewardship in the 21st century demands and what existing institutional models can reliably provide.
In January 2026, an international group of institutional leaders, researchers, and policy thinkers met in the Netherlands to explore these fundamental challenges, convening around the possibility of a Global Resilient Information Network (GRIN) conceived as a path through these pressing issues. Global acknowledges that these challenges must transcend regional boundaries. Resilience emphasises the capacity required to absorb shocks, adapt, and recover while preserving core functions. Information networks provide the redundancy, connectivity, and reach needed to extend beyond any single institution or location.
The group agreed on a statement of intent: “In a complex world, we stand for shared digital stewardship of assets of culture and knowledge across time and space”.
By shared, we recognise that no single institution, sector, or nation can respond adequately on its own. Data may survive while access fails; the loss of context, connection, or trust can be as damaging as the loss of the data itself. Trusted networks matter as much as trusted repositories, and institutional backup alone is insufficient. Stewardship is inherently distributed - carried out by multiple institutions, communities, and individuals, formal and informal, connected across boundaries.
By digital, we acknowledge that while assets of culture and knowledge exist in many forms, the digital domain introduces distinct vulnerabilities and responsibilities. Addressing these risks requires forms of responsibility that differ fundamentally from those developed for physical collections.
By stewardship, we mean the responsible, long-term care of something held in trust for others, including future generations. It is not a single intervention, but an ongoing obligation to safeguard integrity, accessibility, and enduring value.
By assets of culture and knowledge, we refer to artefacts of human endeavour that create, store, share, and transmit meaning, memory, and understanding. We use assets to emphasise their material and infrastructural reality, and culture to avoid narrowing knowledge to a purely technical or academic domain.
By across time and space, we affirm that stewardship must operate simultaneously in the present and the long term - across years, decades, and centuries - and at local, regional, national, and global scales.
From the discussions, it is clear that resilience does not arise from uniformity or centralisation. It emerges through connection: between people, institutions, communities and systems; through coordinated use of existing infrastructure, skills, and knowledge; and through diversity of approaches combined with mutual reliance. Stewardship must therefore extend beyond individual organisational mandates, since no institution can adequately respond to these challenges in isolation.
This statement sets out the case as we now understand it for the conditions we face and the responsibilities we share. Our vision is of digital stewardship as a collective, value-driven practice. If this resonates with you, if you are grappling with similar questions, or if you see connections between GRIN and your own work, we welcome conversation and exchange. The KB National Library of the Netherlands, as convener of the Global Resilient Information Network, serves as a point of contact.
GRIN Conference attendees
Alicia Wise - CLOCKSS
Elsbeth Kwant - KB National Library
Frank Scholze -German National Library
George Oates - The Flickr Foundation
Harry Verwayen -Europeana Foundation
Herbert Van de Sompel - DANS
Jeff Ubois - Internet Archive Europe
Martha Whitehead – Harvard Library
Martijn Kleppe- KB National Library
Michael Peter Edson - Independent
Paul Keller- Open Future
Saskia Scheltjens - Rijksmuseum
Sharon M. Leon - Digital Scholar
Thomas Padilla - University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
William Kilbride - Digital Preservation Coalition
Wilma van Wezenbeek - KB National Library