Thank you for installing Mukurtu

The Mukurtu project, led by Project Director Kimberly Christen of Washington State University, began in the remote Central Australian town of Tennant Creek with the creation of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive. The project was born from the needs of the Warumungu Aboriginal community who wanted a system to archive and organize their digital cultural materials in line with their cultural protocols. Once the Warumungu had their own digital archive it was clear that other indigenous communities could also benefit from this type of system. Listening to the needs of indigenous communities, Dr. Christen quickly saw the potential for Mukurtu to help manage, protect and preserve the digital cultural heritage materials of many communities. CoDA’s CTO, Michael Ashley, is the Development Director of the Mukurtu project. Michael is collaborating with Mukurtu to develop a user-friendly and culturally relevant management system embedded with indigenous social and cultural protocols. By creating an easy-to-use, cultural protocol-based content management system, Mukurtu fills the void left by current CMS, digital archive platforms and Web 2.0 social networking sites that focus on large institutions and the general public by providing:

  • 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 licenses 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

Mukurtu is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Mukurtu is a cutting-edge platform that supports the unique needs of indigenous libraries, archives and museums as they seek to preserve and share their digital heritage. Mukurtu encourages collaboration and innovation as we seek to offer respectful and responsible models for content management.