-- Apologies for cross-posting --

 

Last week the national library of the Netherlands (KB) donated over 3100 images from 3 historic atlases (period 1690-1750) to Commons.

 

Each atlas has its own category 

·         Category:Atlas Schoemaker (2579 images)

·         Category:Atlas_van_der_Hagen (446 images)

·         Category:Atlas_Beudeker (133 images)

 

This was the first time the KB used the GLAMwiki-upload tool, which can upload large numbers of images batchwise. This tools has been used by many GLAMs, including the Institute for Sound & Vision ant the Peace Palace. So far over 430.000 images have been donated worldwide using this tool.

 

The three atlases were digitized in the late ‘90s and put online on the Memory of the Netherlands website. This has been the source of the current donations.

 

·         Atlas Schoemaker displays 2579 images of topographical drawings, descriptions and prints of Dutch towns, villages and hamlets in the early 18th century. It was named after Andries Schoemaker (1660-1735), an Amsterdam textile merchant whose passion was collecting historical and topographic information on towns and villages, and churches and castles in the Netherlands.

 

·         Atlas Van der Hagen from around 1690 contains topographical drawings and prints from across the globe in various formats, beautifully colored and decorated with gold. This relatively unknown atlas from the KB consists of four volumes bound in parchment, each holding approx. 100 pages. They were collected by the Amsterdam merchant and map collector Dirk van der Hagen

 

·         The Beudeker collection from The British Library consists of 24 volumes and is named after the rich Amsterdam merchant Christoffel Beudeker. Volume 21 (from around 1750) contains 133 images devoted to the northern and southern Netherlands. This is the volume donated to Commons.

 

Uploading the images is just the start, in the next couple of weeks the KB will work on

·         Expanding WP-articles about the atlases themselves, the creators/collectors (Andries and Gerrit Schoemaker, Cornelis Pronk, Abraham de Haen, Dirk van der Hagen etc) in multiple language versions

·         Creating / expanding related Wikidata-items

·         Promotional activities outside the community

 

The KB would like to invited all Wikip/m/edians to reuse the images as widely as possible, which could include 

·         Using them in WP-articles (no-brainer)

·         Further (sub)categorization of the images. A subdivision into country/city/place names would make sense,  see for instance this list of place names for Schoemaker. Unfortunately it was not possible to do automatic subcategorization via the GLAMwiki-upload tool.

 

Including these 3 atlases the KB has now released 7 historic atlases, see this overview.

 

With kind regards

 

Olaf Janssen

 

Wikipedia & open data coordinator

 

Koninklijke Bibliotheek - National Library of the Netherlands 
olaf.janssen@kb.nl

+31 (0)70 3140 388
@ookgezellig

www.slideshare.net/OlafJanssenNL