Thirteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

People worldwide are seeking the revitalization of traditional knowledge, culture and history, and museums have an incredible opportunity as anchor institutions to provide this service in a changing and healing planet. Curationist (curationist.org) aspires to be a community-led organization in this mission. We bring together local practitioners and global scholars in the ongoing conversation about how to engage museum collections with online tools to augment and co-design the access to an ever-growing diverse range of open-education resources in cultural heritage materials from all corners of the planet. In the past, research projects involving cultural materials might have required extensive travel to far-flung repositories and multiple bureaucratic requests for images that could take months or years to fulfill. However, the pandemic has taught us that access to research and culture should be more efficient and accessible. Our beta-testing research examines how the Curationist.org platform can provide confidence and authenticity to community users and teachers, providing an opportunity to curate their own multivariate voices for themselves and for future generations. Curationist is researching what assistance smaller institutions and under-resourced individuals need in order to share their collections online. The research process invites complex and nuanced dialogue between curationists, community practitioners, students and teachers, to name a few. The output will provide feedback on their infrastructure and capacity needs, which will influence and direct Curationist’s future directions. This presentation outlines our methodology and learnings to date, focusing on areas of revitalizing traditional knowledge, enhancing community-led practices, and rewriting local history.