Nomination form International Memory of the World Register The Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries 1578-1915 ID[2016-01] 1.0 Summary (max 200 words) The Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries 1578-1915 is of global importance. It is the key to the history of countries all around the world with which Amsterdam had historical ties for centuries. It spans 30.000 large volumes, covering 3,5 centuries in time and 3,5 kilometres in length. It contains written and printed documents, parchments in precious bindings and seals revealing last wills, personal agreements, trading contracts, estate inventories, eyewitness testimonies of both daily life and critical events, and so much more. All together, it paints a detailed image of all aspects of the lives of people of all social classes, inhabiting or passing through Amsterdam, from the 17th to the 20th century. It shows the worldwide connections between families, traders, settlers and scholars. On a greater scale, the archive reflects the evolution of Amsterdam from a modest town to a centre of trade and tolerance – a city that thrived as a result of its international orientation. As the still largely untrodden archive holds the only surviving testimonies to many events, it deserves to be protected and remembered as UNESCO Memory of the World. This way it can be connected to other digitised sources worldwide and help to fill the gaps in our shared world history. 2.0 Nominator 2.1 Name of nominator E.E. van der Laan LL.M, Mayor of Amsterdam on behalf of Amsterdam City Archives 2.2 Relationship to the nominated documentary heritage Since 1656, the Mayors of Amsterdam, representing the City Government, were the custodians of the Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries as the information was highly regarded for a just and legal rule of the city of Amsterdam. The documents were securely kept in a locked room of the city hall and guarded by an appointed key holder, who had to swear an oath of secrecy. In 1915, when the first official repository for safe keeping of the cities archival documents was inaugurated in Amsterdam, the archive of the Amsterdam Notaries was among the first archives to be placed in this repository. See 3.4. History/Provenance By nominating on behalf of the Amsterdam City Archives the Mayor of Amsterdam underlines the importance of the Amsterdam notarial archive – not only for the history of Amsterdam, but for the history of the commerce and culture on a global scale. 2.3 Contact person(s) Drs. Bert de Vries MBA, City Archivist and Director of the Amsterdam City Archives 1 2.4 Contact details Drs Bert de Vries MBA City Archivist and Director of the Amsterdam City Archives Vijzelstraat 32 Postbus 51140 1007 EC Amsterdam [email protected] Tel: +31 20 2511600 3.0 Identity and description of the documentary heritage 3.1 Name and identification details of the items being nominated If inscribed, the exact title and institution(s) to appear on the certificate should be given Amsterdam City Archives The Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries, 1578 – 1915 Collection number: 5075 The Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries contains written and printed documents, parchments in precious bindings and seals. It includes the professional documents of no less than 731 public notaries that were in function between 1578 and 1915. All together the Archive consists of almost 30.000 physical items (called ‘protocols’ in Dutch) containing approximately 4,5 million original notarial deeds (called ‘akten’ or ‘minuten’). They are mainly written in Dutch, but there are many documents in other languages, especially in the languages of nations with whom trade was extensive in the 17th and 18th centuries. 3.4 History/provenance In 1656 the city government of Amsterdam ordered that 'closed' protocols – due to resign or death of of a notary – had to be brought to the city hall to be secured in a guarded and locked room (see 2.2). Before legislation the older notarial documents were sometimes kept at the secretary, but more so inherited by family, sold to successors or simply lost. The oldest officially administered and surviving protocol in the Archive dates from 1578, but it is not necessarily the first that was left in care of the city. Twice, in 1652 and 1762, fire struck inside the city hall and burning papers were reportedly thrown into the canals. As it is unknown how many protocols from pensioned notaries had been turned in previously, it is impossible to say how many of the oldest notarial documents have been destroyed due to one of those fires. A small portion, 850 of the 30.000 protocols in the Amsterdam City Archives show proof of heat damage and some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notaries show larger chronological hiatuses that implicate a connection to the fire. Regulated by king Louis Napoleon in 1806, the Dutch national government had centralised the care for all archival documents in the Netherlands. It is however uncertain whether the Archive of the Amsterdam notaries has ever been physically moved out of Amsterdam. In the 19th century the 2 administrative governance of the archives was handed back. In 1915 the Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries was placed in a newly designed repository. It has been in the custody of the Amsterdam City Archives for the last hundred years. 4.0 Legal information 4.1 Owner of the documentary heritage (name and contact details) City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands E.E. van der Laan LL.M, Mayor. Mayor4.2 Custodian of Amsterdam of the documentary heritage (name and contact details if different from the owner) Drs. Bert de Vries MBA Director Amsterdam City Archives [email protected] Tel: +31 20 2511600 4.3 Legal status Ownership: Amsterdam City Archives The city of Amsterdam has the legal and administrative responsibility for the Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries. 4.4 Accessibility The Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries is primarily accessible in original form or microfilm on site, during opening hours of the building. The catalogue of the complete archive is accessible by an online finding aid. The online accessibility was rewarded with the 2009 Best Archives on the Web Awards from ArchivesNext.com. The objects itself are only partially available in digital reproduction and therefore not easily accessible to foreign researchers. And even when digitised, browsing the large volumes is very time-consuming. Research is therefore still mostly based on the card index initiated in the 1960s. See 3.2 Catalogue or registration details. The Amsterdam City Archives aim for 24/7 and worldwide accessibility by taking the following steps: 1. Digitising. For reasons of immeasurable value for both scientific and family research, the Amsterdam City Archives needs to digitise the complete Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries and has therefore initiated a large-scale project to ensure online access to the many millions of individual documents. First step: all registers need to be scanned. This is quite a challenge as the archive is so immensely large and more than 50% of the documents is bound in old parchments covers; some of them very valuable and some up to 30 cm wide. A further complication is that a small, but important part of the archive is partially damaged due to a fire inside the City Hall in 1762. These documents are extremely fragile and can only be handled with utmost care. The City Archives have extensive experience in mass-digitising processes since the start of 3 the scanning on demand programme in 2007. 2. Indexing. The second step is indexing and transcribing the contents of the now digitised documents. The institution will join forces with the general public as well as specialists and combines crowdsourcing with traineeships for students and graduates. Projects are organised in partnership with the University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht. As the Amsterdam City Archives was the initiator of the award-winning and very successful Dutch crowdsourcing website VeleHanden.nl (‘many hands’) in 2010 we have gained expert knowledge on how to organise crowdsourcing and how to keep a crowd motivated. There are no legal restrictions on the accessibility of the Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries. As the youngest documents are more than 100 years old, protection of the privacy of people mentioned in the documents is not an issue. There are access restrictions to the partially burned documents. These are too fragile for public access. Thanks to the project that has started February 2016, access to the information in the documents will once again become possible. 4.5 Copyright status All documents in the Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries are free from copyright. 5.0 Assessment against the selection criteria 5.1 Authenticity Authenticity of this archive is legally guaranteed. It was the importance of these documents for law and justice that induced the city government to secure them in a locked room inside the town hall as early as the 17th century. The practice of a notary was not a free trade, but regulated by the law. From 1525 on, notaries were admissioned by the regional Court (Hof van Holland). They were examined, swore loyalty and integrity by oath and they validated their deeds on ready stamped and sealed paper. Violators risked prosecution; a notary in 1700 found himself sentenced to death after signing false testaments. Protocols of notaries no longer in function were ordered back to the secretary at the town hall, to be shielded from physical dangers and alteration of its contents. Both authenticity and integrity are therefore guaranteed. A notary client receives a copy of a document that is drawn on his request, so he can prove to a third party what had been written down and signed for approval.