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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

Eap722

Safeguarding Nzema history. Towards an archive of Chieftaincy in south-west Ghana

The history of traditional rule and local chiefdoms of West Ghana is documented in the archives of the Traditional Councils. Documents from the 19th and early 20th century tra…

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EAP703 Pub007 small

Digitising endangered manuscript sources: the notary books of Bahia, Brazil, 1664-1889

The Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahía contains documents crucial for the study of the social and economic history of colonial and post-colonial Bahía. The documents are recor…

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EAP673 1 69 EAP673 KUV 529 005 L

Preservation and access for rare early Kannada books

This project preserved rare early Kannada books, that have significance for the understanding of Dravidian culture and for the creation of new knowledge about colonial South A…

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EAP627 Pub001 small

Digitising endangered seventeenth to nineteenth century secular and ecclesiastical sources in São João do Carirí e João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

This project digitised some of the oldest historical documents in the state of Paraíba: 54 volumes of ecclesiastical records dating from as early as 1752, as well as the signe…

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EAP 626

Tracking the past - the preservation of the railway archives of Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone’s railways thrived from 1893 to 1961. They closed in 1975 and the infrastructure was destroyed in the civil war. This project digitised images and documents inclu…

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EAP609 Pub002 1

Digitising Malay writing in Sri Lanka

The Malay of Sri Lanka have preserved a spoken dialect and a rich writing tradition for over three centuries. Today, the manuscripts of this community are kept in private coll…

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2 0022 rz

The Biobio Legacy: Mapuche-Pehuenche Organizing and Resistance in Chile

Throughout the 1990’s to the early 2000’s, the indigenous Mapuche-Pehuenche community of Chile organized against plans to build hydroelectric dams in the historical BioBio Riv…

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MEAP UCLA

Preserving and publishing the largest Afro-Uruguayan multi-media archive

The Black community in Uruguay was persecuted and evicted from their historic neighborhoods in Montevideo during the 1973-1984 dictatorship. These archives represent the acts …

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MEAP UCLA

Memory of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers Movement - MST

The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) archive provides a unique perspective on the formation and operation of civil society movements. This archive preserves the organizat…

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