Topics in this newsletter:

• Personal reconstructions from the CBG find a place in Atlantis
• Reflection on IIIF Friday
• CBS renews historical population censuses with new scans
• Hosting of websites via own servers
• Do you have a story that deserves to be in our newsletter? Tell us!

Personal reconstructions from the CBG find a place in Atlantis

The CBG Center for Family History takes an important step in the heritage world: individual personal records from various sources are brought together to form unique individuals. These personal reconstructions are managed and stored in Atlantis. It is expected that a total of about 50 million personal reconstructions will be included in Atlantis, based on over 240 million individual records.

The technology behind this is based on the Linked Data standard PiCo (Persons in Context) developed by CBG. This standard facilitates both the registration of individual personal records and the creation of reconstructions that transcend sources and archives. Part of these connections is made using algorithms, but CBG will also actively query the knowledge of users. They can indicate when different records refer to the same person, even with differing spellings or incomplete information.

To make all this possible, it is essential that archives provide their data in a uniform manner. In collaboration with the suppliers of Dutch collection management systems, CBG is therefore working on a sustainable and future-proof implementation.

An important step in the accessibility of historical personal data. We are proud to contribute to this with Atlantis.

Reflection on IIIF Friday

DEVENT was present as a guest speaker at IIIF Friday, an online meeting for organizations working with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). We presented how Atlantis supports the Presentation API and the Image API. These are included at the object level in the Linked Open Data (LOD) sets and visible on the detail pages of records. The setup follows the guidelines of the Digital Heritage Network, with room for customer-specific wishes.

Further development of Atlantis occurs partly through our own innovation budget and partly based on customer requests. Sometimes a customer request leads to standard functionality for all users. For example, a button will soon be added in the viewer that allows IIIF links and Persistent Identifiers to be retrieved directly. IIIF will also be expanded for use with video and audio files.

Atlantis provides a PID per record, via Surfsara or ARK. This refers to the detail page of the record or via content negotiation to the LOD data. Within the LOD, the IIIF Presentation and Image APIs are also included. Due to a fixed and thoughtful URL structure, these links remain persistent and transferable during system migrations. IIIF perfectly aligns with our vision of applying open standards, limiting customization, and making heritage information accessible.

CBS renews historical population censuses with new scans

When CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) and NIWI (The Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services) began digitizing historical population censuses in the late 1990s, it was considered an ambitious and large project. At that time, the software was not good enough to automatically recognize text on a page, known as optical character recognition, or to convert tables into spreadsheets. This meant that a large part of the 42,000 pages of tables from the years between 1795 and 1971 had to be entered manually.

This went as follows: first, the books with population censuses were scanned and released on CD-ROM in 1999. Subsequently, these files were published on the website volkstellingen.nl, where users could search and browse. Excel tables and PDFs were added later. In 2006, this project was completed, but the datasets still contained many errors. Employees of DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) are still working on correcting these tables.

The original scans are black and white and therefore appear grainy. That is why CBS decided two years ago to rescan the paper censuses, this time in color. Since the software is now also capable of automated text recognition, this is going much faster than 25 years ago. The new scans have been included in Atlantis and can be found at historisch.cbs.nl.

Hosting of websites via own servers

Our heritage websites are now hosted on our own servers. This gives us more control over performance, management, and security, and offers benefits for our customers. Our servers are located in the Netherlands, which is not only advantageous in terms of privacy and legislation but also contributes to better performance. Since we are now responsible for the hosting, we also expect a noticeable improvement in the speed and stability of the websites. We can also perform updates and maintenance more quickly and specifically. This ensures a reliable and future-proof environment for all heritage websites.

Several heritage websites have already been migrated to the own environment, and our contacts have been informed about this. Not migrated yet? You will receive a message soon.

Do you have a story that deserves to be in our newsletter? Tell us!

Do you have a special collection or an interesting project recorded in Atlantis? We are always looking for inspiring examples to share with our newsletter readers. It can be a unique collection, a local initiative, or another remarkable project that is registered within Atlantis. By sharing such stories, we show what is being recorded in Atlantis and give others a glimpse into each other’s work. 

Do you have something that is worth being seen? Let us know! We would love to see if we can create a nice piece for one of our future newsletters. A great opportunity to highlight your collection or project!