The Robben Island Museum (RIM) is a traditional museum in the sense that the museum still maintains and manages a collection of artifacts, historical documents, photographs, art works and audio-visual material. These varieties of materials are housed in the UWC –Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, the official collections management division of RIM. These archives provide an irreplaceable documentary record of South African history and culture, predominantly in regard to the apartheid period, the freedom struggle and political imprisonment in South Africa.

The immense Archives contain 100,000 film and video recordings, 5,000 artifacts from the Island an elsewhere, 2,000 oral history tapes, 2,000 posters from the struggle, more than 300 collections of historical documents and in addition an extensive art collection that includes 10,000 political cartoons.

The initial core of the Archives was collected during the years of exile by the London based International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF). With the end of the bannings and the IDAF’s closure the IDAF collection was relocated to South Africa from the nucleus of the archives of the pioneering Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa, based at the University of the Western Cape.

In September 1996 when the Cabinet decided to establish Robben Island Museum as the first official heritage institution of the new democracy it recommended that that the IDAF/Mayibuye collections be incorporated into the museum. This recommendation was implemented the 1st of April 2000, as a part of a co-operation agreement between RIM and UWC.

RIM officially opened the new facilities of the new UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, housed in the Main Library at UWC, on 13 June 2001. The event took place, appropriately, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Soweto uprisings, with Deputy President Jacob Zuma as the Guest of Honor.

MSU-Robben Island Museum Linkage Agreement

MATRIX, MSU Museum, and the Archive collaborate to develop and implement a preservation-through-digitization program for fragile and endangered documentary materials selected by the Archive. The partners consult where necessary with outside experts and institutions to integrate the preservation program within a broader collections and documents management policy for the Archive.

In collaboration with the Archive, MATRIX has trained Archive staff in digitization, storage, and dissemination of this digital material. The project incorporates best practices guidelines and standards for digitizing, preserving, and delivering text and images on the WWW and on CDs; share underlying web architecture and storage techniques; and support the development of an intellectual property policy for the collections and a clear policy for securing the appropriate permissions for digital dissemination. This project utilizes the same web-based digital archive system described above.