June 06, 2008
One of the reasons for doing so is that I have been working in this field for several years and my specialty is about using technology to find looted art. If I’m supposed to be at the forefront of technology, I should embrace all aspects of Web 2.0, including blogging.
There are other reasons I’d like to keep a weblog as well. This is a fascinating field because it encompasses so many disciplines - history, art history, genealogy, politics and the law. As I work on cases and projects, these different areas will each play a role and I’d like to discuss them. I’d also like to share my journey in helping people and organisations try to find items that were looted from. This can be a long and frustrating process which is mostly done in isolation and I’d like to share what I’m going through.
I’m also going to get experts in the field to write about their experiences. These could be lawyers, art historians, policy makers and provenance researchers. Every person working in this field has a unique experience and we can learn a lot from different points of view.
Hopefully readers and other people in the field will comment on the posts and we can create some sort of community. The people working in restitution need a forum since there is a great deal of disparate work being done throughout the world and not everyone knows what’s going on. There are also times when people or organisations duplicate efforts, but with increased communication, perhaps we can eliminate this. My big hope is to help increase communication and build a community, but we’ll see where the blog goes and how it evolves.
Interesting blog