Catalog

A New Standard for Responsible Asset Stewardship

Members: To log in to the Catalog portal, go to portal.catalog.org.

Intro

Catalog is a reference application for a new standard in responsible asset stewardship, delivered as an integrated suite for the people and organizations that create, hold, manage, preserve, or protect intellectual, creative, legal, cultural, and organizational assets.

Established preservation frameworks, including OAIS (ISO 14721), the trusted digital repository audit standard ISO 16363, and their derivatives, were built around making preserved material as readable as possible, for as long as possible. They do not address the opposite case: assets that must not be publicly readable. These standards describe how to preserve files. They are silent on how to preserve authorship, provenance, rights, context, access, and trust, and on how to record each asset's lifecycle as part of its own metadata: its creation, handling, repackaging, and the correspondence, decisions, and collaboration that surround that work. Catalog raises the bar on every one of these.

The suite includes software modules for identity, payments, mail, chat, asset registration, metadata management, digital rights management, file storage and publishing. Each module is usable on its own, but all modules are designed to interoperate, so that together they form a single working environment in which every activity that produces, extends or manages assets is recorded, protected with quantum-secure encryption, and anchored to a public blockchain while the content itself stays private. Over time, this builds a durable, independently verifiable record of the assets in your care and the activity around them, held under your own control.

Catalog grew out of its founder's need to manage a lifetime of work as a creative, and his extensive personal collection of non-fiction books dating back to 1733. Roberto Bourgonjen brings over twenty years of professional experience developing software for major institutional archives in the Netherlands. Catalog was engineered from the ground up after his retirement from business, as a private undertaking. It is designed for massive, global scale, built on archival practice and standards proven at national scale, while its usability and feature set were shaped around the founder's own needs to manage his own archive and communication. It is now licensed through non-profit foundations and made available to end users on an as-is basis.

Task Management

Catalog includes a task management system that allows you to organize and mange your own tasks, and lets you share tasks with contractors or coworkers. It comes with integrated invoicing and payment management. Every task can be recorded through 1-frame-per-second desktop recording, camera capture, and full activity logging. Thereby automatically documenting every draft, revision, decision, and collaboration, including work done with AI. These captures are timestamped to the blockchain, turning the creative process itself into irrefutable, verifiable evidence of each contributor's input. In an era where authorship is increasingly difficult to prove, working without this kind of record is like driving without insurance — you may not need it every day, but when you do, nothing else will take its place.

Mail & Messaging

Catalog includes mail and messaging, designed for both privacy and long-term preservation. Email is stored encrypted at the server, with the option to keep a fully synced copy of all mail on your own computer, enabling private full-text search across your entire correspondence. All incoming and outgoing mails are treated as assets and registered at the Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR).

Chat messaging follows the same principles: messages are preserved long-term, automatically partitioned into conversations, treated as assets and registered to the CPR. The result is a complete, searchable record of every discussion and decision — not just the outcomes, but the reasoning behind them.

We use these tools ourselves. Every dialog and decision-making process behind the development of Catalog has been captured and is searchable, with corresponding screenshots, going back to 2011.

Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR)

Throughout Catalog, every meaningful action — a file upload, a mail sent, a task recording, a chat conversation — is registered as a signed claim in the Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR). Each claim records what happened, who was involved, and when, and is anchored to the XRP Ledger to produce a publicly verifiable timestamp. The result is durable, independent proof that a claim existed at or before a certain point in time — without relying on any single party's word.

CPR is designed to be operated by a federated network of foundation nodes. Each node maintains its own blockchain, accepts claims independently, and replicates blocks from peers, so that any node can verify any claim regardless of where it originated. The system is designed to be post-quantum secure at the claim and archive layer, ensuring that records made today remain verifiable even as cryptographic capabilities advance.

CPR does not adjudicate truth or legal title — it records claims. But by making those claims independently timestamped, cryptographically signed, and durably preserved across a federated network, it provides the kind of evidence that can support authorship disputes, provenance verification, and long-term accountability. For a full technical description, see the CPR Whitepaper.

Catalog.ID — Identity & Membership

Every Catalog member has a Catalog.ID — a digital identity that gives you full control over what personal information you share, and with whom. Your data is encrypted before it ever reaches the server; only you hold the keys.

With a Catalog.ID, you can attribute yourself in your own work — and others can attribute you in theirs, in a way that is cryptographically verifiable and indisputable. Combined with CPR, this means your contributions can be recognized and proven, whether you made them yourself or someone else acknowledged your role.

But Catalog.ID is more than a technical identity layer. It is a membership. Every member accepts the same set of rules: the same confidentiality and consent standards, the same intellectual property and attribution expectations, and the same dispute process with real consequences for doxxing, leaks, and infringement. When two Catalog.ID members collaborate, they do so inside a shared legal and behavioral framework — making it a safe environment to share work, ideas, and personal information. For a full technical description, see the Catalog.ID Whitepaper.

Bitcash® — Payments & Access

Catalog needs to run servers, store data, and deliver content — all of which cost money. The conventional answers to this are advertising, data monetization, or subscriptions. Advertising requires surveillance. Data monetization turns users into the product. Subscriptions create access barriers. Bitcash replaces all of these with pay-per-use micropayments: you pay only for what you consume, in amounts small enough to be affordable, without surrendering personal data.

BIT is the prepaid credit used within Catalog. You load a Bitcash Wallet, and services are metered as you use them — uploads, downloads, storage, streaming, API calls, compute tasks. No account is required for basic spending: a wallet code works like cash. BIT is not a cryptocurrency or investment product; it is a straightforward prepaid service credit, comparable to a stored-value card, operated by a non-profit foundation.

This model also protects published content. Because every access requires a BIT payment, there is no free bulk endpoint to scrape. Mass harvesting of content — whether for unauthorized redistribution or AI training — becomes economically prohibitive, and every request is individually logged and accountable.

Bitcash is operated by Stichting Outpapier, a Dutch foundation. Revenue from BIT payments funds the infrastructure directly — more usage means more resources, not more burden. The developer receives no money from BIT sales; revenue only offsets the cost of server hosting and archive management. For a full technical description, see the Bitcash Whitepaper.

Availability

If you are interested in Catalog, you are welcome to explore the whitepapers for CPR, Catalog.ID, and Bitcash to learn more about the platform and its underlying systems. For further information, Stichting Outpapier can be reached through the contact details on outpapier.nl.