Foreword

The National Archives of the Republik of Indonesia has great pleasure in presenting this international research website to the international community of scholars, archivists and others interested in the history of Indonesia and maritime Southeast Asia.

Foreword by Dr. Mustari Irawan,
Director of the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia

After the Independence of Indonesia in 1945, the Indonesian National Archives or Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) inherited an enormous number of documents dating from the seventeenth to the mid- twentieth centuries from the Dutch East India Company or Verenigde Oost-Indische Companie (VOC) and the former colonial state known as the Netherlands East Indies (1818-1942). Since Independence in 1945, the government of the Republic of Indonesia has kept the VOC records with particular care and attention.

From 2000-2007 large parts of the VOC-archives were inventorized in cooperation with the Dutch National Archives in The Hague together with the University of Leiden. In March 2004 our collections were accepted onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This means that they have protected status and are recognized internationally as a world heritage resource. ANRI feels the responsibility towards the international scholarly community to make this world collection accessable online.

We are especially happy to have been able to embark on a cooperation programme for ‘preservation imaging’ with The Corts Foundation since 2011. Our second term of cooperation (2014-2017) includes the continuation of a public access programme for which this website is a valuable and crucial asset. We hope that this website will attract many international and Indonesian visitors.

Jakarta, June 2014

 

Foreword by Egbert Jacobs,
President of The Corts Foundation

As an international non-governmental cultural heritage organization, The Corts Foundation is proud to be in a second term (2014-2017) of cooperation with ANRI in the long-term digital preservation of a massive collection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century documents, which ANRI preserves in its modern Jakarta depot.

In doing so, we execute our statutory objectives, which focus on the history of Indonesia, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the period of World War II. Our main goals are to digitalize documents and preserve, describe and create metadata. We comply with international standards of sustainability and generally accepted open archival and ICT standards. To make the right choices, we participate in research together with the archival specialists of ANRI and historians of several Indonesian and Dutch universities.

Digital reproduction makes it possible to store original unique vulnerable documents while giving researchers easy access. But digital records on their own are in many ways more vulnerable than physical records. Therefore we have to make the right choices now to monitor the consequences in the future. For all of us this is indeed a great challenge!

In this globalized age, it is important to exchange views and transfer knowledge at an international level. Our foundation steadfastly adheres to these principles by encouraging and facilitating the transfer of knowledge and by bringing together specialists from around the globe.

The Hague, June 2014