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Mukurtu is an open source, standards-based, community archive and content management tool adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property rights systems of indigenous communities built on the Drupal content management platform. Mukurtu provides a flexible and adaptable solution for indigenous communities, libraries, archives and museums who seek to manage their cultural materials (photos, documents, audio, video) and opens a reliable interface between source communities and collecting institutions to facilitate the exchange and circulation of collections' materials, metadata, and indigenous knowledge. Mukurtu uses international metadata standards to ensure interoperability.
Mukurtu aims to fill the gap between commercial off-the-shelf content management systems and open source content management systems by focusing on the unique content management and cultural heritage needs of indigenous communities who manage their own archives, libraries and museums. As a core part of our architecture, Mukurtu takes into account indigenous peoples’:
- Cultural protocols surrounding access and distribution of materials
- Diverse and multiple intellectual property systems
- Histories of exclusion from content and metadata generation sources
- Traditional knowledge relating to collections and item level descriptions
- Need to exchange metadata with national collecting institutions that may hold collections relating to their communities
Core features of Mukurtu include:
- Cultural protocol-driven content, user and group profiles based on indigenous knowledge classification systems
- Pathways for sharing content and metadata between multiple groups with varying access parameters, including batch upload, download and export
- Dynamic, easy-to-use administration dashboard
- Flexible and customizable templates (including indigenous language functionality)
- Clear licensing parameters for content and individual items
Find out more on our website. Follow our progress here at the Townsend Humanities Lab. Join our mailing list or wiki!