SALIM: A public archive of ordinary lives, recorded by the people who lived them

This concept note proposes SALIM (Samtal · Arkiv · Liv · Inspelade Minnen; Stories And Lives In Memory), a public-interest model for recording and preserving the life narratives of older people and people approaching the end of life, with long-term custody held by a national memory institution rather than a commercial provider. The proposal combines three elements: (1) a voice-first, AI-assisted interviewer that conducts extended conversations over weeks or months, with a human present in the initial sessions; (2) a tiered consent and access model under which each recording is designated by the participant, while alive, as private to named recipients, embargoed until a date or verifiable event, or public, with a default closure period of 70 years after death and no provision for indefinite sealing; and (3) guaranteed portability of audio, transcripts and metadata in open formats. The note argues that existing commercial “digital legacy” services cannot credibly promise preservation on the fifty-to-hundred-year horizon over which such material becomes valuable, and that the Nordic folklore archives, with their century-long tradition of collecting ordinary people’s memories, are the appropriate custodians. It sets out a trust architecture for time-locked and recipient-specific release, drawing on information-security practice, and identifies the principal unresolved questions: lawful access to death-register data, the legal durability of embargoes across institutional change, the handling of third-party personal data under the GDPR, and the limits of deletion after formal accession. Secondary use of material for research or language technology is treated as a separate, per-dataset consent, never a condition of participation, with particular attention to under-documented minority and migrant languages.