This edition of The OxyMorons was inspired by a New York Times article from January 1. It immediately struck me that a true OxyMoron play is combining things that don’t seem to go together to create a radically new value proposition. And this story certainly had a set of unusual bedfellows -- Vatican manuscripts and scanning/capture and Blockchain. Oh my!
Diving into the article, I noticed two things.
First, the “Long Island scanning firm” was in fact Seery Systems Group, run by my friend Rich Seery (RS). The Seerys have a long AIIM pedigree, going back to the service bureau run by Rich’s father. Rich founded Seery Systems in 2001, and over the course of his career he has delivered a host of content and records solutions, including:
Microfilm & Document Imaging Conversion Services
Microfilm Equipment & Systems
Document Imaging, Workflow and Capture Systems (Premise Based and CLOUD Solutions)
Records Storage & Media Vault Services
The second player is this story is a blockchain company, ShelterZoom, headed by Chao Cheng-Shorland (CCS) Under her leadership, ShelterZoom has successfully delivered two industry-first, next-generation blockchain-based document, contract and transaction management platforms revolutionizing many industries. As a result, ShelterZoom won multiple global awards such as Top 50 Startup 2021 at WorldFestival and SIIA CODiE Best Emerging Technology 2018. She was named Female Innovator of the Year by Women World Awards and The Responsible 100 by NY City & State as one of New York’s 100 most outstanding corporate citizens.
Here’s my curated summary of my OxyMorons conversation with Rich and Chao. Any errors in transcription or curation are mine.
How – and why – was the connection made between Vatican manuscripts, scanning, blockchain?
CCS: A year ago, we got engaged with a group called Humanity 2.0. Humanity 2.0 is a vehicle led by the Vatican for facilitating collaborative ventures between the traditionally siloed public, private and faith-based sectors. Its mission is to identify impediments to human flourishing and then work collaboratively across sectors to remove them by sourcing and scaling bold and innovative solutions.
In February of last year, my partner Allen Alishahi and I visited the Vatican, and because of COVID, all the libraries and museums were just empty. Before COVID, scholars would travel to the Vatican, sit in the library, and study the precious manuscripts housed there – over 200,000 publications in total. With COVID, the in-person option disappeared. Of course, digitization was an option, but the fragility and unique nature of the source documents required special care. In addition, the Vatican was reluctant to digitize because once the images were downloaded, they could quickly lose control of them. Enter blockchain – the Vatican could still have ownership of all their content and control consumption of all those manuscripts.
RS: The project started with the most in demand manuscripts, those that deal with the liturgy and early Christian writers of the Eastern church (a term for the traditions and denominations that developed in Jerusalem and the Middle East during the early years of the church). The idea was to prove the validity of using blockchain to secure these documents, and then apply those lessons to other collections.
We were in Rome with eight of my staff for close to three months, scanning about 400 books. We chose a scanner from SMA Electronic Document GmbH, a German company that was able to output both 300 dpi bitonal and 600 dpi color at the same time. File size means we can’t really deliver a 600 dpi color book effectively at this point (30 to 40 gigs), but we wanted to preserve that option for the future.
A joint venture between a scanning company and a blockchain company is unusual. How did Seery Systems and ShelterZoom get together?
RS: For years, I've spoken to government officials who wanted to put their documents online but were afraid to – they had been hacked too often. We started to explore how to put certain documents online so that they would be immutable and unhackable. I came across ShelterZoom through a friend of mine who's very involved with blockchain. I was convinced given all the confusion and hype that exists around blockchain that the path to adoption of blockchain was through applications and processes – an area that has been a focus of the content management industry for years.
Why was blockchain so important to this project?
CCS: Most people understand that one of the key benefits of blockchain is security. Because we use a decentralized ledger to distribute documents, it is very difficult to hack them. But that’s only the beginning. Blockchain also give you document traceability and auditability – you can maintain control of a document across its entire lifecycle. This is critical in any industry in which control of intellectual property is important, including mortgage businesses, financial institutions, scientific research, and a host of others. Because blockchain operates in a self-governing framework, you eliminate the middleman administrative layer and processes can operate much more efficiently with truly secure digital assets.
We've often thought of records management, content management, digital asset management and a host of other three letter acronyms as separate disciplines. How does blockchain change this?
CCS: Blockchain is an enabler. The innovation must come from the application layer, and how we create business solutions to solve real problems. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what technology you use. What blockchain does is simplify so many things -- from record keeping paperwork to content management to document management to digital asset management. Now you have hundreds of fragmented software applications out there dealing with documents. What we are trying to do is bring everything into one platform. Blockchain allows us to address the root causes of information and document chaos rather than just apply Band-Aids to the problem.
RS: We're trying to build out specific applications that are dependent upon unhackable documents. What we are trying to do at the Vatican is so much more than just that one project. We are not just trying to create one application for one small market but looking at extending these lessons into a host of verticals. The Vatican is a really good use case, to show the world that there is a new way to manage your content and documents online.
I've got a book called Immigrant Secrets that I sell on Amazon. Could I tokenize it at some point using blockchain, and get rid of the Amazon middleman?
CCS: Definitely. Once it's tokenized, you can start tracking the document and make it much more intelligent. In a way, your book is a document NFT (non-fungible token) -- it's unique and belongs to only you and any people you want to grant access to it. With blockchain, you are the one in control.
How do you think the skill set of people in IG space needs to change?
RS: Customers are going to be asking about this kind of solution, and companies and end users need to get educated. It’s ever evolving, and it’s not happening overnight. I have a lot of people contacting me asking, “How can we be part of this?”
What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
CCS: Back in 2017, we were trying to develop a solution to facilitate how people purchase online property. We put a button on every listing, and when a buyer saw the listing and decided to buy, they could initiate a smart contract immediately on the website. Automating this process is more complicated than just guaranteeing privacy and security, because it involves a network of listing agents, selling agents, buyers, and sellers in a collaborative transaction. Blockchain was a perfect fit for that. This was almost five years ago, and we were too far ahead of the curve. People loved the concept, but we had to downplay the fact that we used blockchain because people just didn’t understand it. That’s changing now.
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