GLAM/Newsletter/December 2016/Contents/Netherlands report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue XII, December 2016

Netherlands report

Image donation Specilla circularia; Glass negatives by photographer Jan Goedeljee; Pattypan training for GLAMs; 1300 historical images from the Peace Palace Library

Image donation Specilla circularia

The national library of the Netherlands recently acquired the Specilla circularia, a thought to be lost text on telescopes and lenses by Johannes Hudde from 1656. To make it more visible and reusable scans of this text were donated to Wikimedia Commons and integrated into the Dutch, English, Catalan, German, French and Russian articles on Hudde.

Glass negatives by early photographer Jan Goedeljee now on Commons

Jan Goedeljee (1824-1905) was a Dutch photographer working in his hometown Leiden and its surroundings. Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, the Leiden municipal archive, holds a large collection of glass negatives, which has been digitised and made available for re-use on Wikimedia Commons. The collection includes photos of many well-known places in Leiden, such as the Academy Building and the Hortus Botanicus, and of buildings that have since disappeared, such as the old post office and railway station. The upload was done by Erik Zachte, using Pattypan and a custom script for the conversion of the metadata. Access the collection here.

Pattypan training for GLAMs

On 19 December, WMNL organised a training for GLAM-employees on how to use the new uploadtool Pattypan. The training focused on how the tool works, the metadata standards that are used on Commons, and some wiki-syntax that is widely used on Commons. The training included a practical part during which some of the attendants made their first upload using Pattypan. The training was attended by 11 people from 8 different GLAM institutions. The slideshow of the training can be found here (in Dutch only). This training is part of a series of workshops that WMNL organises to increase (technical) expertise in its pool of volunteers and GLAM-partners; an earlier training on Pattypan was geared toward Wikimedia community members.

1300 historical images from the Peace Palace Library described in detail

In 2014 the Peace Palace Library in The Hague donated some 2000 high resolution photographs of prints to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from their historical book collection on history, war, peace, international law, geography, related novels and even some poetry. As of now, 31% of these images are being used on Wikipedia pages, which garnered about 73 million page views since May 2014. Unfortunately, although the bibliographic references were in order for each image, some 1500 images lacked a specific description and categorisation so that they could not be retrieved by subject matter. In the past year this imperfection has been largely remedied for around 1300 images, and many unknown pictures have been identified, but still precise metadata is lacking for some prints from a few books. The reader is kindly invited to the Category link given above to help. Some examples of prints with recent descriptions:

The 3rd duke of Alba arrests the counts of Egmond and Horne in Brussels at an invited meal, 10 September 1567. Bor: Nederlantsche oorloghen, 1621
Matthäus Merian der Ältere: Plan of the siege of Nürnberg by the Swedisch army and their king Gustav II Adolf, August 1632. 1642
Griffin of peace. "Den Armen schafft man billich Rath". Johann Vogel: Sinnebilder von dem widergebrachten Teutschen Frieden, 1649.
Karel van Mander (I), Zacharias Dolendo: Betrayal and arrest of Jesus. Jeremias de Decker: Gedichten, 1656
Jacob van Meurs: Map of Guangzhou (Kanton). Legends in Dutch and French, Johan Nieuhof et al.: L'ambassade de la Compagnie Orientale des Provinces Unies vers l'Empereur de la Chine, 1665
Jan Luyken: Funeral procession for Michiel de Ruijter, Dam Square and Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 18 March 1677
Alain Manesson Mallet: Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre. Lighthouse of Genoa, Torre della Lanterna, 1696
Alain Manesson Mallet: Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre. "Fort Sainte Lusie Delve", Forte de Santa Luzia, Elvas, Portugal, 1696
Willem van Mieris/H. van Aa: Title page of Adriaan Pars (1641-1719): Index Batavicus, of naamrol van de Batavise en Hollandse schrĳvers, 1701. One of the many interesting and funny book title pages in the collection.
Unknown author: Reception by the town of The Hague of William III, King of England and stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and Mary II, Queen of England. Four cartouches of street decorations, 1703
Franciscus Darosus and Ignazio Benedetti: Pope Sixtus IV reinstates his librarian Bartolomeo Platina. Vairani: Cremonensium monumenta Romæ, 1778
Barent de Bakker: A bucolic scene with two shepherds, Thyrsis and Aipolos (= Goatherd) illustrating Theocritus Idyll 1 Θύρσις ἢ ᾠδή, lines 12-14. With a rare (?) example of Greek running script, 1779
Rigobert Bonne and André Gaspard: Historical map of Haiti, Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Turks and Caicos Islands, 1780