Mukurtu: an Indigenous Archive Tool

Over the last 15 years Indigenous communities have been at the forefront (yet marginalized) in the debates over and creation of digital technologies as tools for both the preservation and production of cultural materials and knowledge. Mukurtu is a content management tool and digital archive (www.mukurtu.org) that addresses these needs by providing an open source, freely available, international standards-based tool driven by the specific concerns and content management needs of Indigenous communities including: cultural protocol-based access to content, granular levels of system control, multiple and flexible licensing terms and flexible templates to meet diverse linguistic and cultural systems. The tool is built in Drupal 7 (itself an open source platform) providing Mukurtu with a stable and interoperable environment to build upon with the changing needs of Indigenous communities. In this demonstration viewers will hear about the terrain of content management tools, the specific history of Mukurtu’s development, the ways that Mukurtu can be adapted to the range of needs by various Indigenous communities globally, future plans for development of Mukurtu and the critical issues that arise from developing software tools for Indigenous cultural heritage management.

For the most current information on Mukurtu CMS, visit http://mukurtu.org/ and visit http://support.mukurtu.org/ for Mukurtu CMS software support.