The Hague, 13 September 2010

The Dutch National Archives have released more than thousand photos of post WWII pictures of historic political interest to the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation. The pictures are both portraits of national political figures of the past decades as well as pictures of important political events in the Netherlands.

The photos stem from the ANEFO collection (which started as Dutch press agency in exile in 1944), now part of the Spaarnsestad Photo Archive, which in turn is part of the National Archives.

In a festive atmosphere at an event in the parliamentary press center in The Hague, the photos were handed over to the Wikimedia Foundation. A forum of experienced and new Members of Parliament was present who shared stories about their personal memories with the people and events depicted in the photos, bringing the photos to life that way. A sample of the photos can be seen on Flickr.com, a global photo sharing site (with a 'no known copyright' license). The photos will be used in Wikipedia both for existing lemmas as well as for new to write ones. Material available in Wikipedia is without license restrictions.

This hand-over is part of a larger effort by the program 'Beelden voor de Toekomst' ('images for the future') which seeks to digitize photos and make them available to the public as much as possible. Currently the Dutch National Archives are digitizing 1.2 million images under this program.