National Archive Inventory Inventory

As a ‘national memory’ of the Netherlands, the National Archives manage 142 km of archives, 15 million photographs, 300,000 maps and drawings and 1.2 petabytes of digital files of the government and of civil society organisations and individuals of national interest. That archive material, divided into about 7000 different archives, is stored in the depots of the National Archives in The Hague, but the documents are also available and can be consulted in the study room of the National Archives.

In order to search, find and then consult documents in one of those 7000 archives, an Archiefinventary is required. An archive inventory is the access to the archive material in the depots. It describes the background and context of the archive. When and how it is formed. What needs to be taken into account when applying. And especially what the contents of the archive, the separate inventory numbers, are.

The archive inventories can be viewed separately on the website (https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/zoeken?activeTab=archives) and searchable. But they can also be accessed automatically via an OAI-PMH harvesting tool. The archive inventories can then be retrieved as EAD-XML. This metadata is available counted under CC0.