Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge supports the creation and preservation of our cultural record—the vast and ever-growing historical archive that helps us explore and better understand our intertwined humanity. Our goal is to increase equitable access to deep knowledge—from scholarly texts to community collections—that helps  build an informed, culturally diverse, and civically engaged society.

We work with archives, presses, and a range of university, public, and other local, national, and global libraries that are foundational to knowledge production and distribution. We prioritize grantmaking that supports the innovative maintenance of technology, tools, and infrastructure for content related to our social justice orientation, expands digital inclusion, and focuses on the preservation of materials from historically underrepresented and underfunded cultures and populations.

In collaboration with our grantees and funding partners, we aspire to cultivate networked resources, services, and collections, and to ensure that more authentic, reflective, complex, and nuanced stories are revealed, preserved, and told.

Dr. Kimberly Christen talks about Mukurtu, a grassroots, open-source community access platform that allows for respectful sharing of cultural heritage.

A UCLA program is helping communities reclaim their histories and determine what has value for the present and the future.

A network of community-based archives is helping to fill in the missing social history of LGBTQ+ people across the South.

After Ferguson, archivists Bergis Jules and Edward Summers created DocNow to preserve social media posts, enabling activists to document the world’s most important social and political movements.

Rhizome’s Webrecorder software is used to archive complex, interactive websites and new media art for future use and scholarship.