A growing number of archives in the Netherland provide access to their indexes and databases as open data. The Open Archives website provides a search engine that searches all these records sets. The Open Archives website is available in English, unlike the websites of some of these archives. Just type in a name and use the filters to find the record you are looking for.
Available records
As more archives provide their data as open data, more records will become available. Volunteers are also asked to contribute their indexes as open data. Some of the towns currently included in the website are:
- Leiden
- Tilburg
- Amsterdam
- Enschede
- Zierikzee
- Goes
- Wassenaar
- Ede
Check out the map for a complete overview.
Open Archives. Credits: Geographical distribution (Open Archives)
Person graph
A funky feature of the website is that a graph is created for the persons in the records. By clicking the graph icon next to the person’s name, you will see a graph that shows how the person is linked to other persons in the database. Unfortunately, you can’t click the nodes in the graph to see those people’s records, but you can search for them by name to find them.
Person graph of Dorothea Smulders (detail)
About Yvette Hoitink
The person graph is more of a relation graph, you can’t click on the nodes (the persons) but you can click on the relations which starts a search for records where both persons in the relation are present.