Tagging Objects from Colonial Contexts. A Decision Tree for the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin Collections

The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) has an estimated collection of 30 million items, which include zoological, mineralogical and paleontological holdings. Most of these specimens are linked to the Museum’s library, archives and associated material such as historical inventories, travel diaries, field photographs, and scientific illustrations. Even though natural history museums are not the central focus of the current public debates surrounding the colonial heritage of Western museums, these collections are nonetheless part of the colonial archive at large and are the result of interdisciplinary and cumulative practices of colonial collecting. Our sketch proposes a process to identify, check and tag holdings from colonial contexts. This should become a integral part of digitising natural history collections at MfN. The decision tree is therefore already part of developing an algorithm for tagging objects from colonial contexts.