The Archival Collections
at the
International Institute of Social History

This is an index to the archival collections held by the International Institute of Social History. Every entry in the index is linked to a description of the collection in question. Over time, most descriptions will in turn be linked to a more detailed finding aid. In a few cases, we may make the contents of the archive itself available as well (for a small example, see the William Morris Digital Archive). Descriptions of Dutch archives are in Dutch, the other ones in English.

At present you can:

Choose a List

You can consult separate indexes for Dutch and international archives, or look at all collections in a combined list:

All Collections
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Dutch Collections
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
International Collections
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Entries

Index entries contain the following information:

Name: names of persons include date of birth and death, if known.
Period: inclusive dates of the documents present.
Size: in linear meters.
Finding Aid: available finding aids.

Descriptions contain in addition:

Condensed biography or history.
Summary of the contents.

Consultation

If you want to consult a collection, please read our rules first. Note that some owners have put restrictions on access to their records or personal papers. That's why we kindly request you to submit a written request in advance stating the character of your study. This may be done by e-mail to collection.info@iisg.nl.

Other Means of Access

All archives are also listed in the Institute's online public access catalogue, which is accessible in a telnet session (at the login prompt type opac and press Enter). The catalogue contains, in addition, all books and serials in the IISH library as well as a sizeable part of our audiovisual holdings. Archival finding aids, however, will not be part of the OPAC.

Two printed guides to the archives are available from the Institute:

Mies Campfens, De Nederlandse archieven van het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis te Amsterdam, 2nd ed, Amsterdam 1989, 504 p.
Jaap Haag and Atie van der Horst (eds), Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1999, 608 p.

An updated edition of the second guide is in preparation. Consult our Publications page or our publishing house for information about the indexes to major collections we are regularly publishing.

Further Development

Currently all documents are in HTML format. The Institute is in the process of encoding its archival finding aids in SGML using Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Document Type Definition (DTD). More information on the history and development of the EAD DTD is available from the EAD Standards Home Page maintained by the Library of Congress.
In the near future we hope gradually to add all finding aids in this way. For your convenience, however, they will be available for viewing in both HTML and SGML versions. In order to view SGML documents you will need a special viewer. The free Panorama viewer is not currently available for download (see Interleaf for future availability). Access to the SGML version is therefore temporarily limited to those with SGML viewers already installed on their computers.