News

This news section will offer short announcements of new initiatives taken by the DASA project group. These include workshops, training sessions, conferences, presentations and staff or board visits from and to Indonesia; new releases of scanned series; research findings and new (digital) publications.

	Nov. 13, 2016: Siam diplomatic letters officially presented At the international cultural meeting of the Dutch Trade Heritage Network in South East Asia, held at Baan Hollanda Information Center (Ayutthaya, Thailand) a publication was presented on 14th November 2016 about old diplomatic letters from the 17th and 18th century. These letters were found in the Dutch Archives of the National Archives of Indonesia (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, ANRI). read more...
	June 1, 2016: Original Nusantara Diplomatic Letters in a St. Petersburg Collection, Russia In 1910, the Russian collector and scholar N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936) purchased a rare collection of Malay letters from the Muller auction house in Amsterdam. Earlier, in 1890, some Chinese letters were bought in Paris from the antiquarian Saffroi. read more...
	May 27, 2016: First document descriptions of the Appendices to the ‘Resolutions’ (Decisions) published. The first 600 document descriptions of the largest single VOC archival series in the Indonesian National Archives (ANRI) are now available online. When completely digitalized, the Appendices series will include around 555.000 archive scans. read more...
	April 13, 2016: Database of the Marginalia Daily Journals of Batavia Castle successfully completed After a marathon three-month session, Dr. Hendrik. E. Niemeijer, completed the marginalia of the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle from 1659-1682. A large part of these marginalia were transcribed by Drs. Mona Lohanda in 2013. During the recent three-month period, Dr. Niemeijer corrected Mrs. Lohanda’s typoscript of 765 pages sentence by sentence, comparing every word with the original Dutch text in the manuscript, adding text where required. read more...
	Dec. 30, 2014: Diplomatic Letters Project succesfully completed A team of ANRI archivist including Haris Budiawan and Yovi in cooperation with two young researchers from Leiden University, Maarten Manse and Simon Kemper, completed a detailed entry of 4,423 records which gives access to all diplomatic letters in the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle. For the first time, a digital list of Indonesian rulers has been created, including the names as they appear in the sources, and their modern names. read more...
	Oct. 15, 2014: Second Memorandum of Understanding ANRI – The Corts Foundation signed After receiving the approval of a committee of Indonesian government officials from different ministries – including the Ministry of the State Secretariat and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – the Director General of Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Mustari Irawan, and the President of The Corts Foundation, Egbert Jacobs, signed the second Memorandum of Understanding for the period 15 October 2014 – 15 October 2017. read more...
	June 27, 2014: Diplomatic letters discovered in the Daily Journals At the end of 2013, Maarten Manse, a student at Leiden University, and Hendrik E. Niemeijer, historian and project manager of the Corts Foundation, made a remarkable discovery based on their close reading of the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle in the VOC archives at ANRI. They discovered that these contain at least 4300 diplomatic letters in the 1683-1743 period alone. Half of them are incoming letters from Asian rulers. These letters (“Surat Emas” or “Golden Letters” in Malay diplomatic history) are all Dutch translations from the originals. This discovery resulted in a project plan for a database which would enable researchers and the general public to gain direct access to this unique collection. The plan also includes the publication of some letters to provide examples for the Indonesian and international public. read more...
	April 6, 2014: Creation of new indexes started On 7th March 2014 a team of three specialists, Mona Lohanda, Tjandra Mualim and M. Haris Budiawan started a lengthy exercize: the making of indexes on persons and geographical locations. The team will make two persons' indexes: one of Asian names and one of European names. This will make it possible to conduct seperate research on Asian persons, from the small juragan or skipper of a vessel to the Susuhunan of Mataram and Surakarta. The indexes will be visible on the website later, in the same way as the current (expanding) index of ships' names. read more...
	Dec. 30, 2013: New image viewer available In December 2013 we have introduced a new image viewer. This viewer can show the images in a higher resolution and the images can be temporarily enhanced to improve readability. read more...
	Nov. 20, 2013: The Marginalia are currently being extended to the 1709 - 1726 period. The content team is proud to announce that more than sixteen thousand new entries have been added to the marginalia database of the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle. The additional marginalia provide an index to the 1709-1626 Daily Journals. New ship names have been identified and added to the existing index of ship names. We have now published more than 55.000 entries covering the 1682-1726 period. . Currently the content team is working on the 1726-36 decade. It is expected that all marginalia for the whole 1682-1806 period will be published on this website by mid-2014. read more...
	Nov. 4, 2013: Presenting the website of Sejarah Nusantara A video presentation was especially made for the launching of the new website of Sejarah Nusantara in October 2013. It explains the objectives of the digitization project, the preservation of the VOC archives at ANRI, and the use of digital archival information for scientific research. read more...
	Sept. 27, 2013: Sejarah Nusantara Website launched on 27th September 2013 The new website by ANRI and The Corts Foundation is launched on the SARBICA conference held in the Hotel Savoy Homann in Bandung Indonesia. read more...