Up until and including the year 2009, hundreds of eye witnesses of World War II were interviewed in the context of the Erfgoed van de Oorlog (War Heritage) programme. DANS archives and unlocks these ‘Telling Witnesses’. An annotation tool was also developed. The Veteraneninstituut (Veteran Institute) has at its disposal approximately 250 interviews with veterans about their experiences during World War II and the decolonisation conflict in the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea. The annotation tool provides access to this collection of interviews. The tool can be used to search in the documentation and interviews, and interviews can be provided with annotations and transcriptions. DANS was, together with the Veteraneninstituut and the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, one of the parties involved in this project. Annotation protocols and tools have been developed that can find relations between research results and the interview corpus. In the ‘Veteran Tapes’ project, one set of approximately thirty transcribed interviews was composed, which was derived from the Nederlandse Veteranen (Dutch Veterans) interview project. This interview project’s objective is to compose a collection of interviews with a representative group of veterans from all wars and peace-keeping missions in which Dutch soldiers have participated since 1940. Besides the interview audio files, the project also provides summaries. The research results have been published in book form and as enhanced publication. All of the used interviews have been deposited at DANS and are – after permission – available to registered users.
The Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen (Network War Sources) website provides access to digital information on World War II. Via one search option, you can search through various collections for photographs, video and audio fragments, texts and images. The collection is intended for anyone interested in, or researching World War II. This website is a collaboration and is accommodated with the NIOD, Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies).
