Übersee-Museum Bremen

A large portion of the collections of the Übersee-Museum (Overseas Museum) in Bremen originated in colonial contexts. As a multidisciplinary institution, the museum has natural history collections, ethnographic collections, collections on the history of Bremen as a trading hub, and a very extensive Collection of Historical Photographs, which in some cases also document the collections’ contexts and are also closely associated with colonial contexts of collection. In addition, the museum has a library including a large amount of colonial literature and an archive of records on the institution’s history, which facilitate research into the contexts of collection. The history of the museum and its collections is described in the permanent exhibition “Tracking the Past”. The accompanying publication offers an introduction to the contexts and networks through which the collections came about.

The publication of the contexts of collection (documenting collectors, geographic metadata and provenance details) are an important task and challenge for interdisciplinary collection areas with their sometimes wide-ranging requirements for collection documentation. This requires linking collection information across sub-collections in order to meet the requirements of successful provenance research and to create transparency: an important concern for the Übersee-Museum, which is actively involved in professional networks and in discussions with its counterparts on these issues. 

The plan for “IT-assisted documentation of the storage holdings of the Übersee-Museum” began in the early 1990s, and even earlier for portions of the natural history collections. Various databases served as precursors to the current digital cataloguing process (Access, BISMAS at the University of Oldenburg, the database and Content Management System of InformationsGesellschaft in Bremen, dbase). Since 2012, ethnographic and trade studies collections as well as the Historical Image Archive have been catalogued using the TMS Collections Management System (initially TMS 2012, and now TMS 2018 since the most recent update). The 83,130 ethnographic objects are all digitally catalogued in the database with varying levels of documentation. In the trade studies department, nearly 4,900 of the roughly 30,000 objects have been catalogued in TMS 2018. For the Historical Image Archive, around 34,000 objects have been catalogued in the database, amounting to around two-thirds of the total holdings. Of the roughly 1 million natural history objects/organisms, 251,424 have been digitally catalogued, of which 2,755 (herbaria) include standardised digital images. There are plans to digitally catalogue further natural history objects in the framework of a project grant.