Dutch institute saves RI history below sea level

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.