The Kaipumakani Project

The Kaipumakani Project supports the development of a Mukurtu Hub for Hawai‘i and the Pacific, as part of Mukurtu Hubs & Spokes, an IMLS National Leadership Grant to Washington State University. This project will develop the next generation of the Mukurtu CMS and facilitate digital cultural heritage preservation in the Pacific. (http://kaipumakani.org)

Mukurtu CMS is a free, mobile, and open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage. Mukurtu has been adopted by dozens of Indigenous communities across the world. It allows communities to easily manage digital heritage content in a culturally appropriate way. Mukurtu CMS provides:

• Local cultural protocols to provide granular access parameters for digital heritage content;
• Flexible templates that adapt to various indigenous stakeholder needs;
• Traditional knowledge fields customizable for curating content alongside standard Dublin Core metadata fields;
• An innovative set of Traditional Knowledge labels that work with traditional copyright and Creative Commons licenses to better serve Indigenous needs; and
• A safe, secure, free and open source platform for managing digital cultural heritage materials online and offline

The Kaipumakani Project provides:

• Training in the use of Mukurtu CMS
• Assistance with digital heritage collection management
• Assistance with digitization projects
• Test deployment on our Mukurtu test server

If you are interested in trying Mukurtu in your community, see the project website.

For more information about the Hub & Spokes project, see this article by Kim Christen, Alex Merrill and Michael Wynne in D-Lib Magazine.