Collaboration with the Rotterdam City Archive
Rotterdam's City Archive – its public memory - is a record of so much that has happened: you may recall the WW II bombings, but also Rotterdam's history as the economic heart of the Netherlands. It is worthwhile making these sources available.
The City Archive constantly strives to disseminate the story of Rotterdam to the public. The goal is to improve our knowledge of the past. The digitization of the City Archives is an essential step in the process of sharing this knowledge with a large audience. This is the reason why the City Archive and GMS collaborate.
Digitization programmes
GMS has executed several digitization projects for the Rotterdam City Archive in recent years. Several digitization projects were undertaken in 2014, including, among others, the notarial archives and the civil registry. GMS has also digitized the archives of a large newspaper.
“The collaboration with GMS was very pleasant and professional”, according to the [Rotterdam] coordinator digitization. “The digitization of the civil registry has gone according to plan. The need to swap half of the registers during the project in order to avoid disturbing the indexing process at the City Archive was no problem. The digitization project has been carried out by GMS to our complete satisfaction.”
Rotterdam City Archive
The Rotterdam City Archive, or “memory” of Rotterdam, is significant. It is one of the oldest archives in the Netherlands and dates from 1857. Rotterdam has been formed in these last 158 years to become the city it is today. Rotterdam is entrepreneurial, energetic, and pioneering – all of which is made manifest in the City Archive. Rotterdam was one of the first archives in the Netherlands to have created its own E-depot [long term archival system for storage and preservation of static information].
GMS
As a digitization expert, GMS was heavily involved with many digitization projects, among which the digitization of the Rotterdam City Archive. Other loyal archive institutions that we help include Amsterdam City Archive and The Hague City Archive, but we also digitize the cultural heritage of smaller archive institutions.
