GLAM/Newsletter/September 2017/Contents/Netherlands report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VII, Issue IX, September 2017

Netherlands report

UNESCO WiR in Middelburg and Amsterdam

Sandra Fauconnier has spent two short Wikipedian in Residence periods at Dutch cultural institutions that take care of UNESCO Memory of the World documentary heritage.

In July-August 2017, Sandra worked for 8 days at Zeeland Archives (Zeeuws Archief), the archives of the Dutch province of Zeeland. Zeeuws Archief hosts the archives of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, a trading company that, during its history, has mainly specialized in Atlantic slave trade. Its archives are listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World heritage list, as they are unusually complete and well-preserved and present a very deep - disturbing, but historically important - insight into how slave trade worked. During her Wikipedian in Residence project, Sandra trained staff member I.Mostert to become the institution's GLAMwiki ambassador. She helped him write his first Wikipedia articles. Together, they uploaded images to Wikimedia Commons related to Zeeuws Archief's collections. Many of the archive's holdings were also linked on Wikidata (incomplete list). An overview of ships managed by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie was uploaded as a small dataset to Wikidata as well.

Archives of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, UNESCO Memory of the World, in storage at Zeeland Archives
Excerpt of a 1779 slave ship's surgeon's journal, indicating the death of an (unnamed) male slave.
A fleet of ships owned by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, between 1767 and 1780, painting by Engel Hoogerheyden

Sandra then worked for 6 days at three humanities research institutes in Amsterdam: the Meertens Institute, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, and the International Institute of Social History (IISH). Together, these three institutes form the so-called Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

IISH takes care of many international collections related to the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations. It has extensive collections about communism and socialism; several handwritten documents by Karl Marx in IISH's collection are listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World documentary heritage list. Sandra advised the three organisations on how they can interact with Wikimedia projects. She gave a two-day Wikimedia course to staff on location, where a great interest in further work with Wikimedia projects was expressed. During one of the workshops, a staff member of IISH uploaded a freshly digitised PDF of Marx' Das Kapital to Wikimedia Commons; an exemplar annotated by hand by Marx himself.

[Heraldry, image donations] Nassau-Vianden armorial and Kattendijke chronicle

The national library of the Netherlands (KB) donated two medieval masterpieces from its collections to Wikimedia Commons:

The Nassau-Vianden armorial is the oldest known armorial from the Nassau dynasty. It was commissioned by count Engelbert II of Nassau. It contains the coats of arms of 200 years of the Nassau dynasty. Read on (in Dutch)...

The Kattendijke chronicle is a late-medieval manuscript filled with coats of arms and banners related to the family history of the Counts of Holland. Since 1614 this manuscript is owned by the Huyssen van Kattendijke family from Zeeland. Read on (in Dutch)....

The pages (folios) containg coats of arms and other illustrations have been put in a separate subcategory for ease-of-find.