Statement by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation on the "Open Letter: We demand free access to museum inventories of African artefacts in Germany!"
Press release from 10/17/2019
Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the work of museums in Germany knows that they go to great lengths to disclose their collections and create transparency.
The debate about object biographies of African collections is not a new topic for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. On the contrary: for years, it has been part of the daily routine of the curators of the Ethnological Museum to answer all enquiries about the collections and provide comprehensive information. Visitors from the countries and societies of origin are shown everything and are also given corresponding lists. The reality of the museums has long been characterised by intensive cooperation.
In recent years, the Ethnological Museum has made great efforts to inventory and digitise the collections of African objects. We are aware of how important comprehensive electronic accessibility, including images of objects, is for the societies of origin. A total of 75,000 objects have been processed, 61,000 recorded as data sets and 12,243 of these data sets have been placed online in SMB-Digital and are therefore accessible worldwide. The historical archive of the Ethnological Museum is currently being digitised with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Ethnological Museum of the National Museums in Berlin expects its collection catalogues to be available online in two to three years - perhaps even sooner. One thing is quite clear: we could be faster with more resources and staff!
But for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, despite prioritising colonial contexts and Nazi-looted property, it is not just about one region of the world such as Africa. The issue of transparency and accessibility concerns the Foundation's entire collections. At www.spk-digital.de, around 14 million data records from all of the Foundation's collections are currently accessible to everyone, of which around 540,000 are digitised (image/sound/video).