About The Memory

The Memory Database 
Online heritage collections – paintings, drawings, stamps, posters and photographs 

The Memory is a database containing paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, stamps, posters and newspaper clippings from more than a hundred Dutch museums, archives and libraries. You can roam about in The Memory, but you can also search the database for images about specific subjects.
Look at images by Institution.
Look at images by Subject.

Search Delpher as well
Are you looking for information about a particular subject? Do you want to know more about a political-societal subject, your place of residence or your family?  Then the website Delpher offers a great supplement to the illustrations contained in The Memory. Delpher gives you access to four centuries of digitized news from newspapers, periodicals and radio bulletins, and to hundreds of thousands of books. Search Delpher.

Koninklijke Bibliotheek
The Memory is a service of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. All the digital images are stored at the KB and the website of The Memory is maintained there. The various collections contained in The Memory were compiled in cooperation with the participating museums, libraries and archives. These are the participating heritage institutions in The Memory of the Netherlands.

History of The Memory 
The Memory is one of the oldest and most frequently visited databases on the art, culture and history of the Netherlands. It was originally called The Memory of the Netherlands, developed from a digitization programme aimed at enabling Dutch heritage institutions to gain experience with digitization and making collections accessible through the Internet. The programme was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and ran from 1999-2009. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek carried out the programme. That programme has now come to end. The last collections were added to the website in 2012.

Since then it is no longer possible to add new collections to The Memory. This will remain the case for the time being. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek will continue to maintain the website. Since December 2019 the website has moved to a new url and the name was shortened to The Memory.