NFDI4Culture Success Story | 01. July 2024

What are you brewing in your lab? A LIDO application profile for the subportal “Collections from colonial contexts” of the German Digital Library

By Angela Kailus, M. A. , Romy Köhler, M. A. and Dr. Celia Krause

Keywords
Illustrative image showing a sculpture collection of the American Indian Museum.

Sculpture collection, American Indian Museum

"Sculpture collection, American Indian Museum" CC0 Creator: Caroline Léna Becker

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.

Expertise from the fields of natural history and ethnology, as well as from the participating institutions and stakeholders, was brought together in the creation of the CCC data field catalogue. This interdisciplinary collaboration and pooling of knowledge contributed greatly to the success of the project.

Portrait of Wiebke Ahrndt

Prof. Dr. Wiebke Ahrndt | Übersee-Museum Bremen

With their willingness to think beyond the categories of object documentation and questions of provenance research shaped by the Global North, without at the same time neglecting this aspect of the history of museum science in the LIDO documentation, we have received very competent advice from the experts at NFDI4Culture.

Portrait of Romy Köhler

Romy Köhler, M. A. | Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

In developing the recommendations for the cataloguing of collection objects from colonial contexts, we benefited from the expertise of the NFDI4Culture colleagues. This applies to the use of controlled vocabularies and the identification of knowledge gaps.

Portrait of Lisa Quade

Lisa Quade, M. A. | Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

LIDO is an international format for providing descriptive information about digitised cultural heritage objects. It enables data to be published, shared and linked on the Internet. The format is based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), the ISO standard for information exchange and integration in the cultural heritage sector. A growing number of museums and collections are using LIDO as a starting point for publishing their metadata on cultural heritage objects. It is also increasingly used in research projects.

The further development of LIDO is one of the goals of NFDI4Culture. In close cooperation with the CCC Lab, the main objective is to support the development of a standard-compliant format that meets the specific documentation requirements of provenance research in colonial contexts, and to ensure that the profile can also be used for other areas of documentation. Here, the NFDI4Culture staff's experience in LIDO development is highly beneficial.

What are the new documentation requirements for the CCC LIDO profile? It is important that the circumstances of acquisition of objects, which are often characterised by contexts of injustice and loss of information, can be adequately documented. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a meaningful and differentiated controlled vocabulary for the description of the events of change of ownership or possession in the respective object biographies. This vocabulary should allow for an appropriate documentation of the most recent results of provenance research in the individual collections and be a consensual basis for the discourse with the societies of origin. This extended terminology allows for a differentiated recording of provenance events with the respective persons and institutions, places and time periods involved, naming the respective actor relationships.

It is also significant for the historical understanding of objects in colonial contexts that their identification was often accompanied by insufficient knowledge and a lack of sources. This also influenced their integration into the collections of European museums. When researching colonial history from a museum perspective, these practices of knowledge production from the colonial era should not be negated and overwritten, but rather documented as a research activity. Again, the aim is to develop a terminology that can be used to address the activities of naming, categorising and assigning meaning to the objects in individual collections. The interpretations to which objects have been and continue to be subjected in the context of collecting and research are themselves subject to documentation and can now be analysed automatically. On this basis, updated findings from collaborative research with representatives of the societies of origin are also incorporated into the digital provenance documentation.

For the semantic definition of the new LIDO terms, the research assistants of the project Collections from Colonial Contexts of the German Digital Library are cooperating with collection researchers and data experts from the Network for Provenance Research Lower Saxony, the Übersee-Museum Bremen, the Ethnographic Collection of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections in Germany. The LIDO Working Group of the Documentation Section of the German Museums Association guarantees a close connection to the national and international development of LIDO.

The revised LIDO field catalogue and the controlled vocabulary extensions form the basis for the new version of the CCC portal, which will go online in July 2024.

In order to support collections in providing the highest quality and most differentiated data to the portal, the German Digital Library has made available cataloguing guidelines for the CCC LIDO application profile, supplemented by illustrative sample datasets. The extended LIDO vocabulary is openly licensed and available to all interested parties and future data providers.

These materials will serve as a good basis for outreach and training activities in this large community and for the development of standards in provenance research in general. With NFDI4Culture, the CCC-LIDO Lab has developed a demand-driven and consistent application profile that ensures the interoperability of this data in a wider context.

Contributing Partners

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Coordination & Editing

Zahia Schlott, M. A. | Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz

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