a Unique Approach:

Enormous Scrap-Books of the ANP

Before any collection is scanned, its size, composition, and method of archiving have already determined how its contents should be handled.

Olympic Games in Tokyo,
1964. Source: Photo archive AN

A case in point is that of the ANP, which has an archive with over eight hundred huge scrap-books, part of which needs to be conserved and unlocked to the public.

The ANP
A scrap-book does not seem like the most obvious filing method, but it makes sense to anyone familiar with the history and core activity of the press agency. The Netherlands National News Agency (ANP) was founded in 1934 by the ninety-two news papers in the Netherlands that were united in the Dutch Newspaper Publishers Association.

Since its founding in 1934, the ANP has been doing only one thing: providing an objective news service. Because of this very specific task, the ANP also established a very specific archive. The ANP began providing news to the papers in 1934. The radio news service was added later on. After World War II, in 1946, the ANP started its own photography service. This service produced glass, celluloid, and polyester negatives and photographic slides and continued up to 1996. In that year, the ANP continued its production with digital cameras. The better part of more than half a century of ANP photography was preserved.

Source: Photo archive ANP

The archives
The core of the collection is made up of the daily production by the permanent ANP photographers between 1946 and 1996. These press photographers made hundreds of photographs each month, to send to papers and magazines. Day in and day out a wide range of national and international news topics in areas like politics, the Royal Household, sports, economy, disasters, daily life and entertainment was captured in images. The black and white prints were put in large, handmade, scrapbooks and the negatives were archived by date.

The archive contains 880 of these scrapbooks with over 350,000 photographs and an archive with around 1,000,000 negatives. In 2009 Pictura scanned 25,000 negatives and 42 scrap-books and added the metadata from the albums.