[Seminar Series] Digital Archive Footprints: Reflections on Digitisation Training and Research at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Digital Archive Footprints is a collaborative project that traces colonial-era ecological collections held in German institutions, and works with communities to reinterpret and return that knowledge,  ultimately represented through the Milele Virtual Museum as interactive, accessible digital experiences.

A key step toward that goal is our first in-person research and digitisation training phase taking place in June at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. In this webinar, the project team reflects on what that process looked like in practice — what we found in the collections, what we learned about digitisation as a tool, and what it revealed about the gaps between archival records and living knowledge. We’ll share the possibilities it opened up, the limitations we encountered, and what it means to work with collections that are still largely inaccessible to the communities of origin.

The project is a collaboration between the Milele Museum (Rwanda), The Space Botswana, and SAVVY Kwata (Cameroon), developed through the MuseumsLab network and funded by the CollabFund. More information can be found here: https://themuseumslab.org/en/digital-archive

Digital Archive Footprints is part of TheMuseumsLab CollabFund and funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation).

Speaker: Melissa Kurkut (Milele Museum)

Language: English

REGISTER HERE

Image credits: Museum für Naturkunde, Eran Wolff