January 14, 2020 Report Open Access

Making African Connections Infrastructure Report

Baker, James

Project leader(s)

The AHRC-funded project "Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections" launched in January 2019 with the aim of furthering both conceptual and applied debates over ‘decolonizing’ public institutions. A Making African Connections Digital Archive was planned as part of the project activity, the aim of which was two-fold:

• To provide public access to historic African collections held by three museums - Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Royal Engineers Museum, the Powell-Cotton Museum - digitised during the course of the project.
• To enable the project team to experiment with ways of presenting these collections in line with the 'decolonizing' ambitions of the project.

To support the creation of the Digital Archive, the project team used various technologies. This report - produced at the mid-point of the project - describes those technologies, why there were chosen, and how they were implemented. We believe that the products of our labour are hard to understand unless we document that labour. Making ourselves transparent is vital to future interpretations of the historic African collections we are working with.