Search environment personal documents of Dutch Indies veterans

This online environment gives access to two seperate databases: Soldaat in Indonesië and NIMH dagboeken. The first is the title of a book published by the KITLV (Oostindie et al, 2016) and translated into Bahasa Indonesia (Serdadu Belanda, 2017), that was based on about 659 published memoirs (of which 15 websites) of Dutch Indies veterans. These have been fully digitised and structured in metadata schemes, so that the full text as well as the metadata can be searched . The NIMH diaries database consists of annotations taken from 98 handwritten contemporary diaries that have been collected by the NIMH. The handwriting cannot be made accessible through digitisation and optical character recognition, but the diaries have been extensively annotated following instructions on how to code passages that fit into a particular category of violence and manually enter them into an Excel database.

This online environment is at present only accessible to researchers that are part of the research program Independence, decolonisation, violence and war in Indonesia, 1945-1950, for whom an account will be created on the basis of their appointment to the program. This limitation is related to the amount of time and resources invested in collecting the data, and the desire of the research program to be the first to make optimal use of it.

In addition, three legal aspects play a role:

• KITLV's Soldier in Indonesia search environment provides access to PDFs of published memoirs that are subject to copyright. Spreading these PDFs is therefore illegal.
• The NIMH database contains passages from unpublished personal diaries which may contain personal data of living persons that could be subject to the General Data Protection Regulation that Dutch academic institutions have to abide to. . In some cases personal names will therefore have to be anonymized. If you wish to cite these sources please contact the administrator of the database dr. Mrs. Esther Zwinkels (EPM.Zwinkels@mindef.nl)
• Most documents were donated to the NIMH before making archive material available online was possible. No explicit permission has therefore been given to make the documents public outside the premises of the NIMH.