Archive Guide to German Colonial History with new Offers

Many of the conflicts occurring in the world today cannot be understood without an adequate examination of their colonial pasts. From the 1880s onwards, Germany occupied a prominent position among the colonial powers. Today, there are around twenty states worldwide whose territories were once part of the German colonial empire.
Memory institutions are of particular importance when dealing with colonial pasts. Archives provide the most comprehensive primary sources for research. In 2017, Prof. Dr. Susanne Freund from the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam therefore launched the "Sources on German Colonial History" project with funding from the Federal Foreign Office. The primary aim of this project is to provide meta-information on the thematically relevant collections and repositories. As a result, the web portal "Archive Guide to German Colonial History" was launched in February 2019. Around 75,000 objects relating to German colonialism were initially described in it. Most of these were available for the first time in the form of searchable metadata in English and French.

Since its publication, the web portal has enjoyed lively interest from Germany and abroad. The number of visitors is rising continuously. Over the course of time, many enquiries have been answered and additional needs identified. However, from the outset there were also requirements relating to the web portal itself. First and foremost, there was a lack of labelling. To address this problem, the portal has been revised in recent months. New index data has been added, above all that of the former local colonial administrations in Togo, German East Africa and German South West Africa. As a result, there are now more than 86,000 listed objects in the database. Of the more than 450 archives referenced, 25 are located in Berlin.

The thesaurus is also new. The source code for this is also available on the site and can be freely customised to your own thematic environment. Users of archives can reproduce the content of documents as data objects in Wikidata. Archives, in turn, could promote this in a targeted manner with little effort and thus draw even more public attention to their importance. In addition to the database and thesaurus, the revised version of the portal also offers a map tool. In its revised version, the map tool offers online access to 129 historical maps. In addition, a search function is available which is orientated towards both current and historical geography. The "Kurrent typewriter" has also been revised. This tool enables even inexperienced users to decipher individual words and sentences. The words searched for can also be compared with a historical corpus.

All in all, the portal has been updated to better meet the needs of users. Technical support has been secured for the near future, although there will certainly be new mediation formats in the medium term in view of the new technical possibilities.