Archives as Platforms

 The Stadsarchief Amsterdam has set as its goal to make all archival research possible online worldwide. To achieve this, the Stadsarchief started around 2005 by setting up a work process for mass digitisation and establishing a scanning on demand service. Since then, 50 million scans have been made available online and 25,000 scans are added every week. Although this has now become a permanent part of the service, accessibility to the archives with only scans is still limited to online images. In addition to scanning, the City Archives therefore focuses on making archives more accessible through crowdsourcing in which volunteers take over names and descriptions of deeds in an online platform (Vele Handen). One major project is making 2 kilometres of notarial archives accessible. During the implementation of this project, it became clear that manually entering entities for such a large archive is labour-intensive and would take many years. In cooperation with University of Innsbruck, Transcribus was then implemented as a tool to make the handwritten text automatically searchable. Where previously the crowd indexed entities, help is now sought with computer learning to read handwritten text. This technology has been used to make Notarial Archives and now other sources are going to be transcribed made searchable via this technology. This enables a new world of research. The City Archive sees an archive institution as a node in a worldwide network of linkable information. The City Archive’s new infrastructure is therefore Linked Data-based, making many new applications possible. In doing so, the archive transforms from “place where you go physically or digitally” to a much more platform-oriented approach. The City Archives becomes primarily a supplier of reliable data, which can be used in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. Via the website, but also via APIs. Organisationally, the City Archive has made an adjustment by bringing the entire digital chain into one department: accessibility and digital innovation. The department takes care of the entire chain of collecting, ingesting, preserving, optimising and publishing information. This also involves modern, accelerated ways of transferring municipal and private archives. In doing so, two goals are realised: optimising the accessibility of original paper archives, and ensuring sustainable accessibility of digital born information. Both are managed and published by the City Archive, based on the idea of a platform for all forms of use.

Vita:

• 2006 – 2010 Member Advisory Board Knowledge Bank, DEN (Digital Heritage Netherlands)
• seit 2007 Lecturer in Archivistics (Digitization), Hogeschool van Amsterdam
• 2001 – 2023 Projectmanager Imagebank, City Archives Amsterdam
• 2003 – 2021 Senior Projectmanager Digitization and Digital Services, City Archives Amsterdam
• seit 2022 – Board Member, KVAN (Dutch Society for Archivist)
• seit 2021 Head of Accessibility and Digital Innovation, City Archives Amsterdam