NFDI4Culture Metadata API

As part of the 3-road strategy on the documentation and digital publication of collections from colonial contexts held in Germany initiated jointly by the federal, state and local governments, the German Digital Library has been commissioned to set up a central online portal. The aim is to create transparency about the holdings of collection items from colonial contexts in German museums and knowledge institutions in order to facilitate a reappraisal of colonial history from a museum perspective. A first version of the Collections from Colonial Contexts (CCC) service has been available since 2021.

The implementation of the CARE Principles is a key challenge for digital provenance research on colonial heritage. They call for the appropriate handling of data from the perspective of indigenous communities. The German Digital Library has therefore initiated a broad dialogue with academic representatives of the communities of origin and with the institutions involved in cooperative provenance research on their collections. It has also established the CCC-LIDO Lab. Its mission is to develop a new application profile for the German Digital Library's data delivery format LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects), which fits perfectly with the CCC portal.

The use of standards is very important to NFDI4Culture. These ensure that research data can be comprehensively reused in accordance with the FAIR Principles. As NFDI4Culture stakeholders, the German Documentation Center for Art History - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg and the Göttingen State and University Library support the consortium partner German Digital Library's CCC-LIDO Lab in fully incorporating existing standards in the new development. The main objective is to avoid one-off solutions and instead to integrate the documentation requirements of provenance research into the LIDO format, which is already widely in use. This will enhance the interoperability of datasets from different sources.

Many collections have only just begun to re-evaluate colonial heritage. The new CCC-LIDO application profile will therefore benefit not only the portal's data providers, but also all provenance researchers who are investigating the functions of museum objects in their societies of origin and the [illicit] contexts of their acquisition.