PAESE investigated the origins, movements, and historical contexts of *objects* from former German colonies, held in museum and university collections in Lower Saxony.
As the focus was on establishing an infrastructure for collaborative provenance research, a shared database was created and published online: bringing together information from the researched collections, to help researchers and institutions better understand how these *objects* were collected and how their histories connect to colonial contexts.
Since 2022, the Network for Provenance Research in Lower Saxony has hosted the database, expanded PAESE to include all institutions in Lower Saxony, and taken part in the “3 Road Strategy,” helping to establish Germany’s portal for “Collections from Colonial Contexts.”
As part of the next phase, PAESE 3.0, we are updating and expanding this database. Among other improvements, we are moving toward a Linked Open Data structure to make information more transparent, interoperable, and accessible worldwide.
However, we recognize that databases of colonial-era collections have impacts beyond museums and academia—they concern the people, communities, and descendants from the regions where these *objects* come from.
