CASK began with a simple, urgent observation: the heritage of cybernetics and systems science survives largely because individuals — bound by personal relationships rather than institutions — have refused to let it be thrown away. CASK exists to make that rescue deliberate, collaborative, and lasting.
The work is organised around three verbs — discover, preserve, and share. We find the archives held in basements, offices, and closing laboratories; we help custodians preserve fragile and decaying carriers; and we make the contents drinkable for people who were never in the cellar. CASK 2026 was the first gathering. This site is now the hub for a continuing series of events and conversations.
A real clock is running. The custodians are ageing, the carriers are decaying — cassette tapes, VHS, printed gray literature — and offices and laboratories are closing. Yet the means of rescue, from cheap transcription to AI-assisted cataloguing, have never been more accessible. The gap between what is possible and what is being done is exactly the gap CASK works in.
CASK is designed as a sequence: first the people who hold the materials, then the institutions that can house them, then a synthesis that turns conversation into infrastructure.
An online gathering of archivists, scholars, and practitioners, deliberately spread across a week and woven together with informal Tap Room conversations. Read the summary →
Bringing the institutional partners into the room: libraries, university archives, and museums who can offer permanent homes, professional description, and access at scale.
Drawing the threads together: a working register, a network of archivists, a translation "dictionary" linking theory to practice, and a self-sustaining model so the work can pay for itself.
The Tap Room is a recurring, informal, roughly biweekly conversation — part café chat, part working session — where custodians, scholars, and the simply curious meet to share progress, demonstrate tools, and welcome newcomers. It is the connective tissue of the CASK community between the larger events.
Schedule to be confirmed — registration link will appear here.
Hands-on transcription, cataloguing, and the CASK Register.
An accidental archivist tells their rescue story.
Bringing marginal and non-English lineages into view.
Dates and links will be added here as sessions are scheduled. To propose a session or be notified, contact peter.tuddenham@coexplorer.org.
To keep something safe you refuse to keep it in only one place. The LOCKSS principle and "multiple homes" run through everything CASK does.
The CASK Register of Cybernetic and Systems Archives, its FAIR-aligned data model, and a neutral, long-term home in the Systems Community Alliance.
Large language models now do much of the transcription, cataloguing, and metadata — but transparency, integrity, and ethics need an answerable human with "skin in the game."
CASK 2026 was organised through the College of Exploration, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation. Registration revenue and donations are used exclusively to support the program of work to discover, preserve, and share the systems and cybernetics heritage held in personal collections, private archives, and institutional repositories.