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**Collections accessible step by step
Since May of this year, historian Ron Habiboe and heritage specialist Nanneke Wigard have been contributing to making the Museum Maluku collections accessible. Ron was involved even before the museum opened in Utrecht in 1990 and has worked on a wide range of projects and collections in the decades since. Nanneke worked at the museum from 1994 to 2020, chiefly as collection manager and, during the restart in The Hague, as director as well. Both share a great passion for Moluccan heritage and for passing on knowledge about Moluccan history.
Because of the move to a new collection registration system and the accompanying website, access to the collections has been limited in recent years. To gain more insight and knowledge here, our staff Yanise Zijlstra, Esmée Manubulu and Loïs Hutubessy called on Ron Habiboe and Nanneke Wigard. First there were conversations about a range of subjects, such as how the collections came into being and the digitisation projects 'Het Geheugen van Nederland' (photographic collection, 2002-2004), 'Het Gebaar' (archives, objects, audiovisual collection, library collection, 2005-2008) and 'Erfgoed van de Oorlog' (interviews, 2009). They explained how the collections used to be available to researchers and other interested people in the reading room, and from 2009 online as well. Nanneke then brought Yanise and Esmée up to date on the state of play around digitisation and opening up the collections at the end of 2019.
Loïs is currently working on optimising the collection registration system. During the transition in 2021 from the former system (AdLib Axiell) to Atlantis, not all the data was fully transferred. Over the past months Loïs and Nanneke have therefore carefully gone through the data for every type of record – photograph, object, book, archive item and so on. With this work complete, the conversion to Atlantis can be finished and it becomes possible to make the collections accessible again step by step.
