New video tutorials help you navigate easily through the Colonial Collections Datahub
The Colonial Collections Datahub is a digital platform that brings together, enriches and provides insights into information on collections from colonial contexts. In doing so, it brings together information that is currently scattered across various institutions, which is important for doing provenance research. To help users navigate the platform, the Consortium will launch a series of video tutorials. With these, the user can learn more about the platform. The video tutorials can be found on the homepage of the Datahub.
What can you do with the Datahub?
Heritage from Suriname, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Aruba, Curaçao, Sint-Maarten and many other countries and areas can be found in the Colonial Collections Datahub. Aside from offering an accesible platform to search for objects, the Datahub provides a space to add your own perspectives to further enrich the data. In addition, you can become part of a community and provide objects with missing context and narratives.
The video tutorials
The series consists of six videos in which you learn everything about using the Colonial Collections Datahub.
Introducing the Datahub
In this video you will learn about the core functionalities of the Datahub. For example, that the Datahub consists of the elements objects, communities and research aids; but also how you can use the Datahub in a different language. Furthermore, you will learn how to make an account. With an account, you can use all the functionalities of the Datahub and organize objects into personal lists.
Searching objects and belongings
In collections in the Netherlands, you can find many objects that were collected from a colonial context. In the Datahub, you can search which objects there are and learn more about how they ended up in the Netherlands. In this second video tutorial, you learn about the different ways in which you can use the Datahub to search for objects. With the use of filters, you can make your query as broad or as specific as you want, you can change how to view search results and in which order. It also explains more about objectpages and which information you can find there; think about metadata, local contexts, images and ownership information.
Creating and joining communities
The Colonial Collections Datahub can not only be used to search for objects, but also to find peers to shate information and knowledge with. Users can, for example, find other researchers with the same cultural background or the same research subject through the Datahub’s communities. You can make a new community or become a member of an already existing community.
Adding narratives
A large part of the information about objects in Dutch museum collections that were collected in the colonial period is written and registered from a Eurocentric perspective. This includes the information visible in the Datahub. This is why it is especially important for collections from colonial contexts that perspectives of communities of origin are added to the objects’ metadata. In this video, you will learn how to add perspectives and missing narratives to the objects, using the Datahub.
Research aids
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide studies, one of the partens of the Consortium, has created digital research aids for the Datahub. In this video you will learn more about how to use them. The digital research aids are one of the three elements of the Datahub and were created to assist in doing provenance research on these collections. Some of the research aids include more general information about doing this type of research, while others focus on collectors, institutions or locations.
Local Context Notices
In the last video tutorial, you will learn how to add local context annotations to objects in the Datahub. These context notices are an important addition to objects from colonial contexts, because they offer space for cultural sensitivities and values of communities of origin. With these notices, perspectives from communities of origin are added to the Eurocentric perspectives that were used to describe and register these objects in museum collections.