New working paper published on colonial contexts

A new publication on the subject of cultural goods and collection items from colonial contexts has appeared in the German Lost Art Foundation’s Working Paper series: Tagging Objects from Colonial Contexts. A Decision Tree for Natural History Collections is the seventh paper in the online publication series.

In scholarly, public and political debate surrounding the colonial history of museums and their colonial holdings, ethnological collections and cultural objects usually take centre stage. By contrast, natural history collections are rarely discussed – though they are just as inextricably linked to the history of imperial appropriation.

The Berlin Natural History Museum has a considerable number of animal, mineral, fossil and botanical collections comprising an estimated total of 30 million items. The sheer quantity of this material poses a challenge to the digitisation of colonial collections and provenance research.

With the nationwide pilot phase for the digitisation of collection items from colonial contexts now underway, Katja Kaiser and Catarina Madruga have developed an exemplary decision tree to identify 300 objects of colonial provenance from the collection. The decision-making process includes minimum categories of information (“Locality”, “Date”, “Supplier”) and necessary metadata to confirm a colonial context, while the three-stage approach of “Identify”, “Check” and “Tag” allows application to various collections, facilitating the labelling of workflows and establishing the basis for responsible digitisation of the items.

Katja Kaiser, Catarina Madruga: Tagging Objects from Colonial Contexts. A Decision Tree for Natural History Collections: https://doi.org/10.25360/01-2024-00005

Published online at irregular intervals, the series Working Paper Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste comprises texts on current research topics from all areas of activity funded by the Foundation: these include dossiers, guidelines, research aids, research reports and overviews of cultural property expropriated as a result of Nazi persecution or due to armed conflict, cultural property seizures in the Soviet zone of occupation/GDR, and Cultural Goods and Collections from Colonial Contexts.