Wednesday, April 15, 2009

An exploratory meeting at the Zuiderzee museum

Yesterday I went to the Zuiderzee museum, it has a rich collection about the area where my family comes from. It shows how people lived and worked in days gone by. The museum is named after the Zuiderzee, a body of water that became fresh water after the building of the afsluitdijk in 1932 and it has a collection that is particularly focused on the people who lived near it.

The Zuiderzee museum is in the process of digitising its collection and quite a bit can be already found on the Internet on the "geheugen van Nederland" which is called in translation, the memory of the Netherlands. Many Dutch archives and museums collaborate in this initiative that aims to digitise much of the Dutch cultural heritage.

After a number of telephone calls, we had a first meeting in Enkhuizen; it was very much a "getting to know you". We talked about what is important, licenses, meta data and how to make the heritage that has both our interest interesting to our public. Having communicated a lot lately with people like Mathias Schindler, Witty lama and Durova helped prepare me for this meeting.

Given that the Zuiderzee museum is in the process of digitising its collection and is already looking at how collaboration can further its objectives, a possible relation will be much more collaborative. We did talk about our digital restoration efforts, the importance of having information with historic material, the different types of material in the collection...

One of the restorations done by Durov is this photochrom showing two girls from Marken. I had brought this nicely printed at a high resolution as a present. It is pictures like this that made Marken the tourist attraction it still is and as such I hoped that it would be of interest.

Currently there is an exhibition at the museum that aims to give a modern interpretation of modern fashion designers of the Dutch traditional clothing. The colours were added later in the picture but the question what colours they should be will probably always be a mistery.

In a couple of weeks we will be in contact again and explore further where collaboration / partnership may bring us.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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