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The aim of the Cultural Institute is to preserve and promote culture online.
Firsthand testimonials, photographs, or manuscripts, many times these things are
not accessible because they're either held within vaults or people can't travel
thousands of miles to get to them.
It's taking away the notion of
physical custody of archival material and
allowing for access without that process. It's also about building a culture of
interrogation, of going back to history and saying, what happened and what does
that mean
today, and I think it's very important to use technology to do that.
What we're launching is about forty different exhibitions from about
a dozen partners from all across the globe. We're working with curators,
historians, and experts to create stories around all that material because objects
in and of themselves sometimes they don't have context and narrative.
The project will allow us to
pool our resources together and work on exhibitions or online content that
just gives a more global scope. It allows us to take an archive, which is basically held
here in Johannesburg in books and boxes,
and to make it available around the world.
We have the technology and tools
to allow institutions to upload the materials
and to create these online digital exhibitions.
There's a wide variety of different types of media
on the site
whether it's video testimonials or very high resolution photography.
Being able to get that close to those documents online is fantastic and
such a powerful tool.
When you look at an archive like that
it gives you a real sense of what it was like to be there, to read somebody's words
written at the time.
This platform has really helped to bring the material to life
in a way that we hadn't had an opportunity to do before.
What we'd like to do is expand
so that we can cover
different facets of culture, and as we evolve the technology,
as we evolve the tools,
and the user experiences, all of these partners will be able to benefit from all of that.
We want to make sure that this information is available to future generations.
To everybody, to anybody.
It would be best to repeat Otto Franks' words, he said
to build up a future, you have to know the past
and that is exactly what we are doing.