The Stadsarchief Amsterdam has been working for quite some time on unlocking its archives. In the Archiefbank it is currently busy making 32 kilometers of archive available on the internet. It stands to reason that it was impossible to completely digitize that immense archive. The Stadsarchief developed a method to scan the archive pieces on demand. The most important advantage is that only those parts are digitized for which there is an interest. This does make it important that the archive pieces that are requested online are made available quickly – a scanning path with a low lead time is required. That path is provided by Pictura, which scans around 10,000 archive pieces for the Stadsarchief every week.

Halfway through June 2008 the online archive bank reached a total of three million scans – an impressive milestone!