Preserving an endangered society: the case of Maldives

A society is a complex entity. The threats of Climate Change mean that societies on low lying island and coastal nations are likely to be submerged within the century. Some of these nations have been offered a land of their own elsewhere in the world in such a catastrophic eventuality. The Maldives, an island country, is building a futuristic floating city to combat climate change and to keep up with increasing sea levels. Such ground-breaking innovations may be crucial in assisting atoll countries—like the Maldives—as combating the effects of climate change may not bring any sustainable difference in how such countries will be affected.

World Meteorological Organization (WMO) estimates that we have seen 15 centimeters of sea-level rise during the 20th century and projecting 30-60 centimeters by 2100 even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced and global warming is controlled at or below 2 degrees Celsius. Such a calamitous scenario will be particularly concerning for the Maldives, the lowest-lying country in the world, with 80% of the island nation lying less than one metre above sea level.

Even if Maldives choses to be a floating island nation or in the inevitable climatic circumstances, environmental refugees, what must be transported to such a new home if the society is to survive? Clearly people and whatever physical possessions that can be transported must be transferred. In addition, there are many items of digitally encoded information, including, for example scans of physical buildings, mosques, historical monuments, artefacts and landscapes just to mention a few.

This paper addresses challenges which some of the governmental, legal, societal, commercial and personal information present, for preservation and transfer. A new issue which will be investigated is that of where usability and Representation Information overlap strongly with that of relationships between multiple objects.  This may be looked at from the OAIS point of view as a single Information Object or, from a Records Management point of view as a “fond”. From both these points of view one needs to consider, capture, preservation and transfer the relationships between objects. One complication is that the information objects are contained in multiple organizations, each with its own classification system, which needs to be interconnected with other classification systems.

Although much of the information is open, there will be confidential data, including governmental, commercial, health and personal, and these will be governed by strict security policies. The archive for the information must be OAIS conformant and should be ISO 16363 certifiable and so besides demanding a technological solution which fully supports the OAIS Information Model and Mandatory responsibilities. This paper will also describe the work which has been done to capture and preserve the society’s intellectual lifeblood, so that it is ready for transfer to new home to re-create that society.