Despite the difficulties they pose, these acquisition logs represent important, sometimes crucial primary sources for provenance research, the documentation of archaeological finds and investigations into the collections. Making them accessible in digital form allows researchers to work together to interpret the data from diverse, transdisciplinary perspectives, and moreover, fosters the active participation of people with knowledge that is often regionally specific in efforts to shed light on historical processes of acquisition. Publishing this material online opens up a window onto the inner workings of the museums, expanding the access of civil society to the knowledge housed by the institutions. This process, reflective of the notion of citizen science, can throw up new questions that might expand our understanding of the accession strategies and acquisition policies that informed the composition of these collections.

Making the acquisition logs available online as part of an on-going digital publication also aids in efforts to identify and ultimately return cultural assets that were expropriated as a result of persecution by the Nazis, as outlined by the Washington Accord. At the same time, they contribute to our mission of investigating the colonial contexts in which some objects joined the collections, which are often difficult to reconstruct behind the seemingly matter-of-fact accession data contained in the acquisition logs. Opening up the archives and creating transparency around these sources will contribute to our aim to facilitate cooperation and a just dialogue between the collections and societies of origin.

Putting PDFs of the scans of the acquisition logs up for download with almost no annotation is intended as a form of “advance publishing”. It is a first step, which seeks to provide scholarly communities with access to materials in the quickest and most comprehensive way possible. In order to make it easier for the public to read and interpret the information these materials contain, and in particular to make them more accessible to non-German-speaking readers, further steps are required. This includes the partially automated expansion of indexes, as well as the development of an interface for the online catalogue of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s digital inventory. The transcription of the handwritten entries using OCR text recognition and their translation into other languages would improve accessibility, however, this exceeds the current technical resources available to the project.

The project Provenance and Collections: Publishing the Acquisition and Accession Logs of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Online publishes the entire historical collection of these books, comprising more than 1,000 volumes. The only factor restricting this publication is the need to respect the privacy of parties included in the logs when a collection object is acquisitioned or donated. For this reason, for acquisitions since 1950, personal data is blacked out.