beeldbank.amsterdam.nl:
A Public Success
Stadsarchief Amsterdam has made its newly developed image bank available to the public, making the city archive one of the first organizations in the Netherlands that was able to share large collections quickly and openly with a large public audience.
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| Source: Photo collection Stadsarchief Amsterdam |
New concept
A completely new concept was developed, letting the image bank show a set of random images on its opening screen. Another feature is the filtering technique for the search option. It lets you input a search phrase and then narrow the search by clicking on the filter list.
Large numbers
During the entire digitization process we kept coming across the usual large numbers. After all, the city archive is the heart of Amsterdam’s historical documentation centre. It encompasses an incredible 35 kilometers of archives, a historical topographical collection with millions of maps, drawings and prints, a library, and a large sound, movie and photo archive.
Topographical coverage
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| Source: Photo collection Stadsarchief Amsterdam |
The Stadsarchief image bank now holds approximately 225,000 images, many of which come from various collections of topographical photographs and building plans. At least 80,000 more topographical maps and 10,000 more building plans will be added to that collection. The Stadsarchief strives to offer the most complete topographical coverage of the city as possible.
The Stadsarchief tells the story of Amsterdam through images. It contains, for instance, photographs from typical Amsterdam city photographers such as Jacob Olie. Although Olie was an amateur photographer, his pioneering contributed greatly to our current view of the nineteenth century. The image bank Amsterdam makes tens of thousands of photographs and prints available, including works from famous photographers such as Ed van der Elsken and Frits Weeda. All for free. And if someone is particularly taken with any of these images, he or she can simply order a copy online.
The image bank is an application of Memorix. The user friendliness that a complete management environment offers becomes clear once you look at the image bank. Its functionality will be extended even further in the near future.
