On 17 November EHRI presented itself on the Networking Day of the Dutch Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen (Network on War Sources, NOB) in Amsterdam. EHRI’s project director Conny Kristel, Veerle Vanden Daelen (responsible for investigation and identification of archives) and Annelies van Nispen (users and standards) talked for an hour to an audience of almost 100 people about various aspects of the EHRI project. The focus of the presentation was on the international collaboration that is central to EHRI. After a short introduction by Conny Kristel, Veerle Vanden Daelen and Annelies van Nispen explained the use of the EHRI portal and how the currently 1,920 archival institutions and more than 200,000 archival descriptions were integrated.

Dutch heritage institutions

The audience consisted mainly of people working for Dutch heritage institutions with collections on WWII. EHRI and NOB are both facilitated by NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and have worked together on occasion.

Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen

Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen is an initiative that is collaboratively working on improving digital access to the Dutch collection on World War II. The objective of the network is to increase usability and searchability of the joint collection of data from the approximately 400 Dutch institutions with collections relating to the Second World War, in terms of who, what, where and when. Central to this is the development of a number of digital basic services that enable institutions to better serve their audience.

WarSampo system

The theme of the NOB networking day was sources without borders. Another interesting lecture was given by Eero Hyvönen, director of the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. In his talk he presented the WarSampo system for publishing collections of heterogeneous, distributed data about the Second World War on the Semantic Web.

For more info, visit Oorlogsbronnen (Dutch)

Image: Annelies van Nispen presents the EHRI portal