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Akan Vault

Mission

Preserve Black history for the world

Free, verified, traceable, culturally responsible, and durable across generations.

What the platform protects

  • Original historical materials.
  • Contributor identity, consent, and intentions.
  • Provenance and evidence supporting historical descriptions and claims.
  • Cultural context, community authority, and access restrictions.
  • Long-term public availability of material approved for public access.

Principles that cannot be traded away

History is free
No public historical record is ever placed behind a consumer subscription. Professional and institutional tools may be paid; the public archive is not.
Verified first
Machines may transcribe, extract, classify, and suggest. Only authorized people approve public metadata and publication.
Originals are immutable
An uploaded original is never overwritten. Corrections create new versions, transcripts, annotations, or derivatives, and fixity data is preserved.
Provenance is visible
Where a record came from, who described it, its verification state, its rights status, and when it changed are always available.
Cultural restrictions override convenience
Search, AI retrieval, exports, APIs, derivatives, and analytics respect access, consent, embargo, cultural-sensitivity, and AI-use restrictions.
AI never becomes the authority
Akan AI explains evidence and distinguishes primary sources, secondary sources, community knowledge, cataloger descriptions, and its own interpretations.
Accessible by design
The public site and the authenticated application target WCAG 2.2 Level AA as acceptance criteria, not as later remediation.
Global architecture, focused launch
The data model supports the whole diaspora from the start: multilingual names, historical place names, uncertain dates, and contested geography. Pilot content focuses on the United States and the Caribbean.

Where the platform stands today

Akan Vault is under active construction. The foundation, identity and authorization, preservation ingestion, editorial workflow, public discovery, and Akan AI are being built in that order, and each stage is tested before the next begins. This site reports only what exists.