The Antwerp MAS – Museum aan de Stroom, which holds the collection of the former Ethnographic Museum, recently launched their online collection database. You can browse it here. Note that the data describing the content is only in Dutch. So figure becomes beeld and mask, masker. Unfortunately only the basic data for all of the items held in the collection database is shown; provenance and acquisition date (information so valuable) aren’t listed (yet) – I would for example love to know when the kifwebe mask below entered the collection. The images are also only in low resolution, but at least the items that are not on display in the museum – over 95% of the total – are now accessible. What is also nice is that you can leave comments with additions or reactions if you spot mistakes or gaps. Note that not all of the 400,000 objects in the collection of the MAS have already been added to the database. Happy browsing*, there’s plenty to discover! (*best not with safari since there are still some small bugs in the software)
UPDATE: both acquistion date & provenance are now also visible inextended display (blog post: Ethnographic Museum Antwerp Collection Online, February 14, 2014) !
