Digital Historical Atlas

Original project plan:

 

Introduction
Libraries, museums and archives are the keepers of a precious objects that are part of Dutch cultural heritage. It concerns books, pamphlets, prints, commemorative medals, paintings, letters, other types of unique documents and a wide range of three dimensional artefacts ranging from ship models to harnesses. The objects are often not fully catalogued, they are sometimes vulnerable and therefore not easily accessible for the users. The KB and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have taken the initiative to publish parts of their rich collections on the Internet with the objective to provide better acess to the users.

Contents
'Digital Historical Atlas: Contemporary images and texts concerning Dutch history' focusses on pamphlets from the KB, taken from the Knuttel collection, and history prints and commemorative medals from the Muller and Van Gelder collections at the Rijksmuseum. The project focusses on four important periods in seventeenth century history, the Dutch Golden Age, namely 1618/1619, 1647/1648, 1672 and 1695. All selected objects from the KB and the Rijksmuseum of these periods will be digitised. The website that results from this will contain approximately 2200 pamphlets, 600 history prints and 200 commemorative medals. The infrastructure is developed in such a way that it can easily be extended with other types of objects like paintings three dimensional objects. Other organisations, such as archives, can cooperate and other periods can be included. The subject, the history of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, is particularly interesting for cross cultural collaboration to provide better access to original documents and objects from libraries, museums and archives. In this project, the focus is on political history, but scholars from other disciplines may find relevant sources here, for example literature, art history, history of mentality and history of economics.

Website
The website is developed to serve several types of users, e.g. experts at the universities with their students, teachers of history and their students at high schools and a wider audience that is interested in the 'Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer'. Similar activities in other countries, such as the American Memory orject of the Library of Congress as well as various related initiatives in the Netherlands, have been taken into account. The latter include projects like the Stuyvesant-project in Utrecht, 'Golden Age' and 'De Opstand' at Leiden University and the website on the Renaissance period of the Arts faculty of the University of Utrecht.

Planning
The project started in June 1999. The importance of this project for the KB lies in the creation of a website together with the Rijksmuseum and in the technical and financial impact of the large scale digitisation that is required for this project. This project was the first in which the KB was confronted with a storage capacity that exceeded the 1 Terabyte. Furthermore, this project has given the KB more experience with proven standards, such as the TIFF-format for archival storage, GIF and JPEG for thumbnails, JPEG and Mr. Sid for presentation purposes and XML and XSLT for the infrastructured that is required for searching and retrieval. In total, ca 2200 pamphlets, 600 historical prints and 200 commemorative medals will be digitised and published on the internet.