GLAM/Newsletter/January 2025/Contents/Netherlands report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue I, January 2025

Netherlands report

3 Million Dutch Cultural Heritage Images in Commons & 400,000 RCE images now in higher resolution & Usage of DBNL in Dutch Wikipedia articles

3 Million Dutch cultural heritage images in Commons

Lizzy Jongma at a GLAM-Wiki-UK-conference in 2013, speaking about opening up museum collections

Dutch GLAM institutions (libraries, archives and museums) were quick to join the open access movement. From 2000 onwards Dutch museums, archives and libraries made millions of images from their collections available online - no watermarks, open access. That was far from usual practice at museums at the time. I still vividly remember a meeting for cultural institutions in Florence in 2015. Lizzy Jongma of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam enthusiastically explained why the Rijksmuseum had decided to publish all images of art works from the Rijksmuseum that were in the Public Domain in high resolution on their website. As I was sitting in the back of the large room (an amphitheater, with at least one thousand attendants) I could closely watch museum directors shaking their heads in disbelief. Their first question was of course about "the business model". Jongma explained that Rijksmuseum wouldn't need to handle thousands of invoices of EUR 40 each anymore, and could diminish staff at that department from 30 to 5. The rest of the staff could be employed elsewhere in the museum, e.g. digitizing materials. Cheaper, and more beneficial to the world. At the same time, this would improve attention for the Rijksmuseum collections. "And these Chinese mugs might even have their Rembrandt colours improved - because they can now download highres originals."

Images copied to Commons on a large scale from 2009

Dutch GLAM institutions were helpful in bringing millions of images to Wikimedia Commons. My rough estimate is that 3 million images were brought to Commons during the years 2009 up to 2024. Most of the time the two parties formed a kind of alliance, in which the museums, archives and libraries make images available and facilitate the process of uploads by Wikimedians. To show this, I will give seven typical examples of Dutch GLAM taken to Commons in the following overview.

Dutch GLAM to Commons

Institution	Date	Number / usage (1-1-2025)
Tropenmuseum Amsterdam	2009-2010	51,935 images; usage: 34,739
Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed)	2012-2013	486,362 images; usage: 54,601
Naturalis Biodiversity Center	2015-2016	277,704 images; usage 33,856
Amsterdam City Archives (Stadsarchief Amsterdam)	2016-2018	24,909 images; usage: 8,602
Dutch National Archives (incl. Anefo)	2017-2018	531,292 images; usage: 244,521
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam	2018-2019	545,860 images; usage 95,234
Leiden University Libraries	2010-	193,900 images; usage: 15,586
More than 50 other collections	2010-	est.: 1 Million images

2,1 Million images from these 7 GLAM institutions were brought to Commons. These images are now used 487,000 times across Wiki. That's not bad at all. My rough estimate is that there are currently (Jan. 2025) 3 million Dutch GLAM images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to Wiki-colleagues Multichill, Basvb, Husky, Jan Arkesteijn, Hansmuller, Fæ, Olaf Janssen, Vera de Kok, Mr.Nostalgic, Clausule, Spinster, 85jesse, MichellevL, Jane023, Robotje, Ymnes, Alexis Jazz, Kleon3, Mdd, Wikimedia Netherlands and many others.

400,000 RCE images now in higher resolution

Way back in 2011 the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE, Government Service for Dutch National Heritage) made 450,000 images of Dutch heritage available under a Creative Commnons license. These images were copied to Wikimedia Commons in 2012 and 2013. RCE later uploaded another 500,000 images to the RCE website, a.o. of shipwrecks and of Dutch cultural heritage in Africa, Asia and South America. The RCE website now holds almost 1 million images. However, the images uploaded 13 years ago were in low resolution. 400,000 of the RCE images uploaded in 2012 are now upgraded to higher resolution, thanks to Mr.Nostalgic who performed this task in the last months of 2024. By the way: RCE is currently making structured data available for these images, and is also making suggestions for uploading the next half a million images to Commons. Go for it!

Usage of DBNL in Dutch Wikipedia articles

The Digital Library for Dutch Literature (DBNL) is a frequently used source in the Dutch Wikipedia.

In this article in Dutch, we look at how often DBNL is referred to in which Wikipedia articles, and which DBNL pages are cited most often. We also search for Wikipedia articles that are entirely or largely based on DBNL.

The most important points (as of September 5, 2024) from this article are:

18,458 distinct Wikipedia articles together contain 30,768 links to 27,875 distinct pages in the DBNL.
These references are mainly to DBNL author pages (16,591 URLs), followed by texts (13,835 URLs) and titles (240 URLs).
The article De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen contains the most links to the DBNL with 442, followed by the article Schilder-boeck, with 70 DBNL URLs.
The table of contents of the Algemeen letterkundig lexicon is referred to no less than 229 times from Wikipedia, with the PDF of De eerste Surinaamse sportencyclopedie (1893-1988) by Ricky W. Stutgard in second place, with 147 references.
There are 17 Wikipedia articles that were written (almost) entirely on the basis of DBNL content. In other words: they owe their existence to a large extent to the DBNL.
The underlying raw data used in this article is available on GitHub.