While threats to national and international heritage as a result of geopolitical tensions and cybersabotage have increased significantly, Dutch heritage institutions are insufficiently prepared for disasters, digital or physical attacks. We published an opinion article about this on our website (9 May 2025), in preparation for the National Resilient Heritage Action Day, which was being organised by Unesco Netherlands, Blue Shield Netherlands and Cultural Emergency Response on 14 May 2025.

I had the opportunity to say a few (similar to the opinion article) words at the closing ceremony of that day, which took place at our Library. We argue not only for more awareness of this among heritage managers and enthusiasts alike, but also for greater openness about incidents. Our fear of sharing sensitive information and reputational damage makes us reluctant to do so, but that closed attitude increases vulnerability. I can now also thank my colleagues Helen Johnson and Foekje Boersma for preparing the opinion article. At the closing ceremony Kathleen Ferrier from Unesco Netherlands announced that the action day will be an annual event. That is good news!

These are the words (slightly modified) I shared at the closing ceremony, and also here I thank Helen Johnson and Foekje Boersma for their co-authorship!

Threats

Resilient heritage is a subject that is close to all of our hearts, that we are all involved in and concerned about. The threats our heritage faces are very real. But fortunately, there are also opportunities. I will share my thoughts on that at the end of piece.

That our heritage is vulnerable, the KB has unfortunately experienced several times closely in recent years. In 2023, a small fire in a technical installation produced smoke that affected parts of both the physical and digital collections. During the same period, excess rainfall managed to find its way into our storage, forcing us to take intensive measures to keep the collection dry and mould-free and, in 2023, six Russian literary works were stolen from our collection in what was suspected to be the work of a Georgian gang whose members were caught last year. But even though this gang is no longer active, our beautiful works are still not back. Unfortunately.

With the interviews I gave on this subject, and the opinion article we published on our site, I wanted to contribute to raising awareness that there are contemporary threats affecting our heritage. For we heritage institutions are often reasonably aware of the “classic” threats in the form of robbery, water and fire, but this list has expanded in recent years to include two other impactful threats in the form of warfare / geopolitical threats and cyber sabotage. The destruction of the Unesco World Heritage site “The Historic Centre of Odessa” in Ukraine and the hack at the British Library in 2023 are recent examples.

As the hack on our colleagues at the British Library shows: it is no longer just our physical heritage that is at risk, our digital heritage is also under constant threat of sabotage. Back then, some 600 GB of data stolen from our colleagues in England was put online, including personal data of users and staff, after this national library had refused to pay a ransom. On top of that, a number of servers were rendered unusable and that was disastrous for the library’s services. To this day, the British Library is working to restore the necessary infrastructure and the financial damage suffered is now running into millions. In addition, of course, the impact it has for customers, and therefore society, cannot be expressed in monetary terms.

And as the KB, we manage both a large collection of 122 kilometres of written heritage, and a digital collection of some 2 billion files - so on the need to protect both the physical and the digital asset, we can speak up.

Finding the middle ground

So the amount of threat has increased, and the potential impact is great. A picture that gets all of us, as heritage guardians, pretty sad. Our shared ambition: ‘increasing resilience’, is so easily stated. But how do you do this when our need to let people enjoy our heritage is at odds with our need to protect it? How do we find the middle ground in this?

For me personally, resilience does not mean panning yourself so that you can let everything slip away from you. To me, resilience actually means realising how vulnerable you are and seeing opportunities when things go against you. Historian Beatrice de Graaf, she is one of our board members, put it very aptly recently, I thought. Especially when the world is bleak, she sees it as her job to look for the light. She was talking about tipping points in history; the moments when it “matters”. Moments when there is so much turmoil that everything becomes possible again. I think this is one of those moments.

Keeping (in) control of the public good

How do you become resilient as a public organisation? To start with, by ensuring that you do not become dependent on (large) commercial organisations, so-called Big Tech, or nowadays also on governments that do not have heritage’s best interests at heart. You do that by keeping control (and preferably ownership) of ‘the public good’. By keeping public information public. In short, by ensuring sovereignty and autonomy. We cannot do that alone. We can only achieve that by acting together as a public sector, both nationally and internationally. The same goes for my next point.

After all, resilience also means keeping digital infrastructures secure. You don’t want sensitive information to leak. Or that unique or important data disappears. You want to keep control over your systems. In the KB, too, we have to deal daily with malicious people who send endless amounts of requests to our digital operations, with the aim of discovering leaks in the system. We cannot lower our digital shield for a moment - and we will only have to increase our efforts to keep fending off these attacks successfully.

We share this sensitive reality because we hope that our transparency on this will help smaller heritage institutions, for example, to realise that their digital infrastructure also needs proper defence. After all, smaller institutions in particular - for all sorts of legitimate reasons - have sometimes not yet been able to put enough effort into this, when they could be interesting targets.

Speakingatmeeting Thanks to Beeldstudio KB | National Library of the Netherlands

Unite with others

Let me then move on to our opportunities. Our prospects for action, or the light we can look for together. Because the first thing we can all do is unite with other institutions in the Digital Heritage Network, and take note of the activities of the Safe Heritage Task Force (Task Force “Veilig Erfgoed”). This taskforce will be familiar to all working in the heritage institutions: it is a fine initiative of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to make the heritage sector more resilient against the threat of (hybrid) conflict. And fortunately, we are also already making connections with Unesco Netherlands, Blue Shield Netherlands and the Cultural Emergency Response in making Dutch heritage more resilient, as with this Action Day.

Openness

And that brings me to a second action perspective that I advocated in the run-up to the Action Day: openness. In our opinion piece, I wondered: why are we reluctant to share information when dealing with threats or incidents? Is it out of legitimate fear of not disclosing vulnerabilities? Or is it out of fear of reputational damage? I will always - if it can be done safely - opt for openness. Because I believe we benefit as a society when knowledge flows.

You are now in a national library. So I can’t resist quoting a poet. ‘Everything of value is defenceless,’ Lucebert wrote in his famous poem “De zeer oude zingt” (from the collection “Verzamelde Gedichten” (Collected Poems), available from us under signature number FD 1975/262). But I believe we can make everything of value resilient. And that the key to this resilience lies in awareness, on three levels.

Awareness

One. As heritage institutions, we are of course all more than aware of the value of heritage, its fragility and impermanence. But are we all also sufficiently aware of our own vulnerability? Do we know our action perspective in case of threats? For instance, do we all have a Contingency Plan? Especially for small institutions, it can be valuable to consult larger colleague institutions on this. Also engage with fellow institutions in your own region, to be able to act jointly in case of specific regional threats.

Two. I mentioned it earlier - I hope that as heritage institutions we all realise that we need to be open with each other about heritage threats and incidents. It is precisely our reticence about this that can further damage our heritage, because by doing so we ourselves constrain our ability to learn. So let us jettison reticence wherever possible, to empower ourselves and each other.

Finally, I call for greater awareness about the value of our heritage among all of us, on a human level. Heritage becomes truly resilient only when we all look after it. Not just the institutions, but also the users and enthusiasts. If only by being alert to suspicious behaviour. After all, heritage belongs to all of us. It seems like we don’t always realise that.

But when we do, we make the defenceless more resilient. And we can still make Lucebert proud.