About

Mukurtu West is a regional hub site supporting the development of the Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS) across communities in Oregon.

Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. We are committed to maintaining an open, community-driven approach to Mukurtu’s continued development. Our first priority is to help build a platform that fosters relationships of respect and trust.

Mukurtu CMS provides:

  • 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.