Dutch institute saves RI history below sea level

By Thor Kerr

LEIDEN, The Netherlands (JP): Five hundred thousand books and journals, most on Indonesia, lie below sea level here in the vault of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology's library.

Chief librarian Dr. Roger Tol points to the wall and jokes, "Drill a hole there and the whole collection will be destroyed."

But he picks up a large encyclopedia on Southeast Asia, printed in 1724, and cradles it like a baby. The five-volume Valentyn encyclopedia, containing magnificent fold-out lithographs of maps and sketches, is worth about US$10,000.

The encyclopedia is part of a collection dating back to the mid 17th century, when Dutch shipping dominated the seas of South and Southeast Asia.

Most of the collection's older publications were written by Dutch navigators, botanists and administrators, but there are also ancient manuscripts by Buginese, Malayans, Balinese and a host of other Southeast Asians.

The institute says its library contains "the world's largest and best collection of written documents on and from Indonesia outside Indonesia".

There are larger collections in Indonesia, such as in the Indonesian National Library, but they are not as well cataloged or preserved. Many of the institute's books have been fumigated, deacidified and in some cases rebound.

The orderly collection traces Indonesia's history -- albeit mostly through colonial eyes -- from the 17th century. It includes colonial records and journals, books and publications printed in Indonesia and studies by Western and Indonesian academics.

The institute now acquires 5,000 Indonesian titles a year through its Jakarta office, which works in coordination with the Indonesian Institute of Science.

This acquisition program includes microfilming at least 50 Indonesian daily newspapers in Jakarta and flying 18 newspapers and magazines twice weekly from Jakarta to the institute, which has a complete set of The Jakarta Post on microfilm, beginning from its first edition in 1983.

This meticulous acquisition program and timely cataloging make finding documents easy. When Indonesian Minister of Education Wardiman Djojonegoro visited the library in late October, Dr. Tol pulled out a 1957 children's book written by the minister's father, R.A. Djojonegoro.

The institute has managed to maintain good relations with the Indonesian authorities despite often stormy political ties between the two nations.

Dr. Tol says the Indonesian government has never requested the return of indigenous manuscripts from the institute because most them are copies, given to or commissioned by colonial administrators or members of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Batavia, now Jakarta.

This reliance on colonial record keeping means that some periods may be less well documented in the library, such as when France and Britain ruled the East Indies briefly early last century and during the Japanese occupation during World War II.

There is also a strange mix of records when the Dutch took over Indonesian institutions after World War II, only to lose them again to the Indonesian republic.

Perhaps the biggest gap in the collection is for the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the then Indonesian president, Sukarno, pursued isolationist state policies.

"In the Sukarno period we had difficulties updating materials. Only after the Orde Baru, the New Order, we set up a good acquisitions program," Dr. Tol told The Jakarta Post last week.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the institute gathered material on Indonesia through Cornell University's microfilm program and private sources.

It is still buying publications on the antique book market to fill the information void lasting until Soeharto became Indonesia's President in 1967.

The institute has an amazing hoard of photographs, maps, paintings and sketches from Indonesia.

It's 125,000 photographs, 98 percent of them taken in Indonesia, are locked away in steel cabinets at 18 degrees Celsius.

Marianne Fluitsma, who takes care of the photographs, says the collection is "the most accessible" in the Netherlands.

The photographic collection is accessible because Fluitsma and her colleague are tirelessly cataloging its contents. This is an enormous task, so far 45,000 photographs have been cataloged.

Flicking through the manual catalog, which includes small prints and descriptions of each photograph, is fascinating. The photographs, dating as far back as 1857, document curiosities like the opium factories in West Java late last century.

One particularly grizzly series of photographs captures the bayonet execution of communists by an Indonesian soldier in Madiun, East Java, in 1948. The series shows half a dozen youths lined up in a freshly dug trench.

The soldier approaches from behind, stabbing them one by one with his bayonet until they have all fallen. In the last photograph, he finishes them off with his bayonet where they lie in the trench, which seems to have been dug specially as their grave.

This series and other photographs are expected to be available on the Internet from mid 1998. The institute is developing a program to scan thousands of the photographs into a digital format that can be accessed worldwide.

The institute's library catalog can already be accessed through the institute's internet homepage (http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/institutes/kitlv).

Fluitsma's favorite photographs of Indonesia were taken by two Britons, Woodbury and Page, who traveled around the archipelago in the second half of the 19th century. Many of their photographs were exhibited in Jakarta three years ago and have been compiled in a book by the institute.

Academic research

The institute is an excellent place to start researching a book or thesis on Indonesia because its collection is extensive, well cataloged and up to date.

Leiden-based academic, Dr. Leo Schmit, a keen admirer of the institute, said: "You can see from the documents in the institute how an Indonesian institution has developed and where it may be heading."

Dr. Schmit spent four years writing his postdoctoral thesis on the adjustment of Bank Rakyat Indonesia's (BRI) rural credit policies in the mid 1980s. He traveled to Indonesia several times while writing his thesis, but relied almost solely on the institute's library to trace the bank's roots back through the Dutch-administered Volkscredietwezen, or Popular Credit System, to the 1895 establishment of the Priyayi Bank of Purwokerto, Central Java.

He says the journals and reports in the institute's library helped him understand BRI's institutional behavior.

"The royal institute was the main source... for my thesis," said Dr. Schmit. "Virtually all the policy documents come from the institute."

People from all over the world use the institute's resources, but far fewer Indonesians visit the institute now than before 1992, when the Soeharto government stopped all Dutch government aid to Indonesia.

Dr. Tol said there was an "enormous decrease" in the number of Indonesian students visiting the institute after the Dutch-funded exchange programs and scholarships ended.

Indonesians can still benefit from the institute through its Jakarta office, on Jl. ......, phone .....(maaf, ini menyusul) For Rp 12,000 a year, they can join the institute to receive the institute's quarterly journal and a 40 percent discount on its publications.

Membership may also help them get access to copies of documents lost in Indonesia.