S67 ENGAGING COMMUNITIES THROUGH ICT III

A Technological Framework to Support Digital Repatriation Programs

Hunter J1*, Sledge J2*, Davis T3*

1. Distributed Systems Technology CRC (DSTC), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
2. Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Washington DC, USA
3. WINHEC (World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium), Winnebago, Nebraska, USA

Many cultural institutions around the world are custodians of cultural artefacts of which they are not the traditional owners. The Indigenous communities to whom these objects traditionally belong, would like access to these resources in order to recover, preserve and revitalize their cultures and to educate their young people in culturally-responsive ways.

In this presentation we will describe a collaborative project being undertaken between the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, researchers from DSTC at the University of Queensland and Native American community representatives, which aims to build bridges between cultural institutions and indigenous communities by providing an integrated software system to support “digital repatriation” programs.

The integrated system will enable:

  • Authorized community members to search the museum’s collections and submit requests for digital versions of artefacts;
  • Museum staff to process and respond to requests by returning digital information packages back to the requesting community;
  • Returned digital artefacts to be downloaded to the community’s local knowledgebase;
  • Local community members to attach their own metadata, annotations, stories, access restrictions and traditional care constraints to the digital artefacts;
  • A subset of the community knowledge to be returned to the museum to enrich both virtual and actual exhibitions.

This paper will describe the project to date, the technologies under development or to be integrated and the challenges and issues which will need to be resolved, in order to achieve the goals outlined above and to actively engage both cultural institutions and Indigenous communities.

 

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