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Arcadia

Arcadia serves humanity by preserving endangered cultural heritage and ecosystems.

We protect complexity and work against the entropy of ravaged and thereby starkly simplified natural environments and globalized cultures. Innovation and change occur best in already complex systems. Once memories, knowledge, skills, variety, and intricacy disappear – once the old complexities are lost – they are hard to replicate or replace. Arcadia aims to return to people both their memories and their natural surroundings. What we want to preserve remains fragile, small and dispersed. But if we do not protect it – if it vanishes forever – then future generations will have no base from which to build a vibrant, resilient, green future.

Because knowledge should belong to all, we also promote open access, seeking to make information available without barriers of cost or distance. Charities, businesses, universities, schools, the media, politicians, and citizens all benefit when research and data are no longer locked behind paywalls or reserved for those who live near their repositories. The economy benefits too from better-informed decisions, improved schooling and knowledgeable citizens, from enhanced academic research and innovation based on shared knowledge.

We do not accept applications, but seek and support organizations run by exceptional individuals, operating in a cost-effective, scientifically sound, and ethical manner that share our vision.

Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Funder Website

Arcadia Projects

Eap 880

Fragments of Sikkim: preserving and presenting the palace archives of a Himalayan Kingdom, 1875-1975

This project preserved, digitised and made available to academic enquiry the hitherto neglected royal archives of the former Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Sikkim, which merged…

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Eap 879

Continued digitisation and preservation of the Arabic manuscripts of Djenné and surrounding villages

The city of Djenné, Mali, shares the same glorious past as a centre of learning and commerce with its more famous ‘twin sister’ Timbuktu. Held in private collections in Djenné…

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EAP863 sample image

Preserving a unique archive of diaspora and disease in the Indian Ocean from 1867 to 1930: a test case from Mauritius

The Bois Marchand Cemetery in Mauritius was the largest cemetery in the Indian Ocean. The records held in its archive are a unique repository of demographic and disease data, …

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EAP855 Opening Event Team

Anti-colonialism and religious independence in the Philippines around 1900: preserving the archival records of the early history of the Iglesia Filipina Independente

Documenting the religious self-assertion of the Filipino elite around 1900, the records of the Iglesia Filipina Independente not only represent the negotiations between a loca…

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EAP853 Pub006

Creating a digital archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal and notarial records in Mamanguape, São João do Cariri, and João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Notarial and criminal sources are fundamental to the study of everyday, lived experiences in imperial and republican Brazil. However, the documents are kept in disorganised ar…

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Eap 848

Digitisation of Georgian national heritage materials at the National Scientific Library

The National Scientific Library of Georgia holds the Library-Museum of Joseph Grishashvili, one of the most valuable and full archives in the Caucasus. The material covers a p…

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EAP847 Pub001

Protecting the Archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa

The archive held in the bell tower of St. Andrew’s Church in Nairobi (Kenya) includes material produced by two colonial missions, the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya and t…

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Eap 845

Endangered ethnohistories: preserving and digitising the DF Ellenberger ethnohistorical archive

"History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern", compiled by the French missionary David-Frédéric Ellenberger during the second half of the nineteenth century, remains the seminal…

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Eap 844

Recovering the Middle Congo archives at Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo: new steps towards the social history of the Congo

This pilot project intends to locate the lost archives of the French colony of the Middle Congo, in Pointe-Noire, and to ultimately make them accessible - essential for studyi…

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