Allied Collections

The project Allied Collections has been set up by the Dutch Army Museum with technical support of Trezorix and is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

The project aims to make the various digital collections of the Army Museum searchable and available to end users in an integrated and attractive way.

In the past years the Army Museum has digitized large parts of its collection of military objects and works of art. Nowadays the museum holds a digital treasury of resources that can give online visitors a multifaceted picture of Dutch military history. These collections include:

• the Hoefer catalogue, about 11000 catalogue cards with keywords, descriptions and often images of military concepts from the early 1900's
• the Landholt military dictionary from 1861, containing about 3600 keywords and descriptions
• the Glossarium Armorum, an illustrated thesaurus, containing around 700 concepts and images concerning armour (defence weapons)
• the Armamentaria, articles on various subjects in military history
• the Visser collection, about 175 historical small arms
• a uniforms thesaurus, containing around 900 keywords and 9000 descriptions, references and images
• a thesaurus of military units, about 1200 records
• military vehicles, about 90 descriptions
• official regulations, about 1200 records

At the moment only a small part of this digitized material is made available online. In addition the possibilities of making visible the relations between the various collections are limited. The Allied Collections project aims to improve this. To do so, relevant content is being extracted and brought together in an online findability layer that forms the basis for the presentation on the web. This findability layer is set up according to the RNA architecture and is being created and maintained with the RNA Toolset.

The collections hold texts from various different time periods, which results in substantial differences in linguistic usage and spelling. To be able to integrate this content nevertheless in an efficient way natural language processing will be applied, amongst other things.

The Army Museum will also apply facet determination. This functionality will for instance be used to determine, based on depicted uniforms, in which army unit persons in old photographs served. This functionality takes up to the high demand for this type of information and is being offered to online visitors as a web based service.

Finally, the Allied Collections project also functions as a best practices project about workflows for setting up a flexible, online information space that other organizations can connect to easily and for integrating heterogeneous collections in that information space.