On February 27, Nigeria became the first African country to preserve history in the Arctic World Archive.
The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records stored on Piql, a type of digitised film that can last up to 2,000 years. The archive facility is 300 metres beneath a mountain, where the cold, dark, and dry conditions are ideal for preservation.
AWA was established to hold the “world’s memory” for future generations. Started in 2017 by the Norwegian technology company that developed Piql. 
It houses a diverse collection of historical and creative records from 37 countries, including the Vatican Library and the European Space Agency, as well as works by Chopin and Belgian photographer Christian Clauwers, who documented the Pacific’s disappearing Marshall Islands.
According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, 38% of webpages from 2013 to 2023 no longer exist, implying that a wealth of information and history has simply vanished. AWA arose from a research project aimed at discovering a secure way to store data in the long run. “The world is becoming more aware of how fragile data storage is; every time you need to migrate it, something changes,” says AWA co-founder Katrine Loen.
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Nigerian records are a mix of social and cultural history, as well as archives from the country’s creative industries, gathered from 12 Nigerian organisations, including private art foundations, museums, and libraries.
Historian Nze Ed Emeka Keazor started collecting Nigerian records in 2022, when Piql appointed him chair of its first Africa office in Lagos, and he immediately began reaching out to Nigerian cultural institutions to encourage them to preserve their records.
In Nigeria, libraries and museums often suffer from poor funding and still rely heavily on paper, so researchers can lose track of important documents easily, or see them buried in archives where no one can access them.
Dr. Chima Korieh, an expert in West African social and economic history at Marquette University in Wisconsin, US, spearheaded a project to assist the Umuchieze community in Imo State, south-east Nigeria, in preserving their stories, accounts of their cultural practices and rites of passage to adulthood, and records from precolonial Nigeria. Its AWA deposits included manuscripts detailing the Umuchieze people’s history as well as reports on the community’s judicial and political systems.
The National Commission for Monuments and Museums and the National Council for Arts and Culture both made deposits, including reports on Nigeria’s creative economy, which includes the music and film industries.
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