Kenneth Cohen (a Fulbright Scholar of American and Museum Studies currently based in Ivory Coast) recently embarked on a praiseworthy mission: to build an online catalog of the collection of the Musée des Civilisations (MCCI) in Abidjan. This museum owns one of the largest uncatalogued art collections in West Africa, numbering some 15,000 objects.
As the museum continues to recover from raiding and damage during a civil war in 2010-2011, it is creating an online catalogue of the collection to help document, preserve, and share it.
The value of the project is that the museum’s overworked staff will not have to write descriptions for every object as a team of 25-30 scholars from Côte d’Ivoire, France, and the U.S. who will log into the catalog and add descriptive information based on the photos and metadata that gets uploaded. The team includes Yaelle Biro, Christine Kreamer, Susan Vogel, Susan Gagliardi, Najwa Borro, yours truly, and others.
Cohen is currently recruiting equipment and funds to pay extra staff to help complete the project and created a fundraising page for individual donors: you can contribute and find more information about the project here. They have already raised $ 14,000 and need another $ 6,000 for the final months’ labor costs.
ps unfortunately a lot of objects disappeared from the museum’s collection through the years – luckily the Musée de quai Branly in Paris holds the the photographic archives of Bohumil Holas (the museum’s curator in the 1960s and 1970s); they include a lot of installation shots (as above), which give a good idea of the museum’s holdings at the time. Cross-referencing these files with the new catalogue will give a good idea of which objects are no longer in the museum.