National Archive first Dutch archive on Flickr The Commons

October 21st 2008

Since 21 October 2008 the National Archive is the first Dutch heritage institution to internationally disclose part of its photo collection on Flickr The Commons. With this initiative the National Archive shares its historic photo collections with a large audience aiming to let this audience enrich these collections. As part of the new collaboration between the National Archive and Spaarnestad Photo, photos from this archive have been added as well. Visitors can tag information to pictures of the Labour Inspectorate from the first half of the previous century, to pictures about the First and Second World War, emigrants, the Royal Dutch East-Indian Army (‘KNIL’) and the 1928 Olympics. The pictures are all found at www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief



Flickr is a world-wide sharing website for pictures and videos, where visitors can add tags and comments to each other’s pictures. The National Archive joins Flickr The Commons, a cooperation between photo archives from around the world and photo website Flickr, as the first archive of the Netherlands. The Flickr The Commons initiative was started to give public institutes a joint platform where they can share their photo collections with a large audience. With all this information from the visitors, the institutes can in their turn increase their knowledge of the collections.

At the moment every photography fan can browse through a selection of the National Archive’s photo collections and of its partner Spaarnestad Photo on www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief. The National Archive is looking for the stories behind the pictures and invites the website’s visitors to add their comments: do you recognize your parents or grandparents in one of the pictures? Can you tell us more about the activities in the pictures? Do you recognize your street or town? In this way, the National Archive asks the visitors to help preserve the Netherlands’ national memory.

The National Archive digitized the pictures that are on Flickr in high resolution as part of the large-scale digitization and preservation project Images for the Future. In this project, the National Archive, the Filmmuseum, the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision, Knowledgeland, Centrale Discotheek Rotterdam and the Association of Public Libraries work together in saving and disclosing the core collection of the Dutch audio-visual heritage. The National Archive plans to unlock 1.2 million photos to the audience.