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Sharing data between institutions, a step-up or a cover-up for restitution? Boundaries and Challenges in ‘digital restitution’

de Clippele, Marie-Sophie;Piret, Bérengère
(2024) Changing Approaches Towards Restitution and Return of Colonial Heritage: Tracing Experiences and Identifying Shared Decolonial P — Location: Leiden (2024.May.23AD)

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In 2023, the Belgian federal State granted infrastructure funding for the digitization of natural history museum collections (CANATHIST) and archives related to colonial history (COSO, Rwanda archives). The focus lies on the establishment of digital platforms to share digitized data, together with partners from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Rwanda, and from Burundi, or with the wider public. Both of these projects however raise practical and legal questions. First, there is the immensity of the task of digitization and more importantly of labeling of the metadata. The description of these digitized items require a decolonial approach, raising specific challenges to scientifically highlight colonization and its actors in all its dimensions. The Rwanda Archives project offers interesting insights in that task as well as on the restitution question: Rwanda only wants the digital version of the archives, not the original ones. Second, the digitization of these collections and archives does not in se affect their ownership. Digitization can at most facilitate access to displaced heritage under two conditions: the legal owner must adhere to Open Data directives and make the digitized copies publicly available, and recipients must have genuine access capabilities (Kasongo, 2021). Moreover, rights associated with digitized copies, such as the exploitation licenses, are typically determined by the owner of the colonial heritage. Consequently, digitizing colonial heritage perpetuates or even strengthens inequities in access to it (Lixinski, 2021). Therefore, access and sharing of digitized collections and archives should not shy away from the ownership question, thereby entering the restitution debate. This paper argues that in that perspective it might be interesting to embrace the approach of the commons: the focus would then lie on the sharing of rights on the data with a common governance system to define digitization strategies and terms of use for the copies.
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de Clippele, M.-S., & Piret, B. (2024). Sharing data between institutions, a step-up or a cover-up for restitution? Boundaries and Challenges in ‘digital restitution’. Changing Approaches Towards Restitution and Return of Colonial Heritage: Tracing Experiences and Identifying Shared Decolonial P, Leiden. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/244600