Greetings from Rotterdam: volunteers put their shoulders to the Moluccan archive
What if a group of volunteers could achieve in three days what would otherwise take a museum team months? In Rotterdam it happened. In May, Museum Maluku began digitising a remarkable part of its archive – and the response was overwhelming. People from all over the country signed up to help. "As a team we would never have managed this so quickly," says collection manager Esmée Manubulu. "There is a task our small team might have needed six or seven months for – we have now done it with this whole crew in three days. That is incredible."
The work takes place in the archive in Rotterdam. In the same city the museum collection is kept under museum conditions. Here it concerns archives of Moluccan organisations such as the BPRMS, photographic collections from the camps and audio and video material from the past – on cassette tapes, VHS and even 8 mm film.
For many volunteers it is more than work. "I do this for the community," says one retired participant. "But also out of curiosity. Here I come across documents belonging to people from the camp where I grew up. Handwritten employment contracts. I simply knew those people."
Others see it as a weekly ritual. "I have every Tuesday off, so I can easily come and help," one volunteer says, laughing. "Just put me on the rota." Asked why she helps: "Through this I keep discovering more about myself. About Moluccan history in the Netherlands. That moves me."
What is remarkable: the volunteers do not only come from Rotterdam. People travel from Deventer, Elst and even Vlissingen to do their bit. "That people are willing to travel that distance says everything about the bond with this heritage," says museum director Henry Timisela. "We are a community museum and this digitisation really is carried by the community. The fine thing is that our collection is enriched further as a result. Volunteers recognise people in photographs and can often tell the stories that go with them. That is invaluable to us."
The Museum Maluku collection consists largely of gifts from Moluccans in the Netherlands. After the building in Utrecht closed, the archive stood in containers for years. Although part of it has already been digitised, an enormous treasure of material is still waiting to be opened up. Thanks to this new project, made possible in part by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek among others, that is now changing.
At the moment we are working with a new registration system. The collection is therefore not yet publicly accessible, but we hope to be able to share more about that before long.
Would you like to help too? Then send an email to
info@museum-maluku.nl with Helping in the archive in the subject line
