Open Access Versus the Culture of Protocols

Technology today is enabling indigenous communities, the producers of the objects in ethnographic collections, to reconnect with objects in museums and make them part of their contemporary lives.The opportunity exists for the objects to become part of the ongoing societies of today, no longer viewed as the remains of museum cultures. While the control of access to and the repatriation of objects are separate issues, they are overlapping. The process of digital repatriation has resulted in the development of often complex protocols for managing the information once it arrives in the community. Such protocols give people a degree of agency over museum collections, but it is also important to acknowledge the complexity of the process.