Digitising migration heritage: A case study of a minority museum

Museums are increasingly digitising their collections and making them available to the public on-line. Creating such digital resources may become a means for social inclu-sion. For museums that acknowledge migration history and cultures of ethnic minority groups as important subjects in multiethnic societies, digitisation brings new possibili-ties for reaching source communities. This article presents Web projects conducted at Museum Maluku in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The article focuses on the museum’s experiences with cross-institutional Web projects, since digitisation of the museum’s collection was initiated through collaboration with major national heritage institutions. These collaborative projects furthermore have raised the visibility of Dutch-Moluccans as a part of Dutch national history. The article also discusses how source communities through digital participation can become involved in building cultural heritage. Based on the case study of the Museum Maluku, it is argued that in order to design an appro-priate mode of user participation as well as a sense of ownership, it is crucial to take memory politics of source communities into account