Digital Archive System at ANRI (DASA) was the name of the multi-year project (2011 - 2018) that The Corts Foundation and the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) conducted together in close collaboration, in order to digitally preserve and provide access to a selection of the Dutch East India Company records of the 17th and 18th century.

These records were formed during the time that the Dutch East India Company was a strong ruler in the region, with headquarters at Batavia. A large number of documents is made accessible at the website of Sejarah Nusantara at sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id . The Corts Foundation and ANRI hope to serve scholars, as well as the general public, with detailed information of the early modern history of the archipelago.

The project officially started on 18 May 2011 with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between The Corts Foundation and ANRI in Jakarta. Members of both boards were present in an official meeting to sign the MoU. A second memorandum of Understanding for the years 2014-2017 was signed in October 2014.

The Digital Archive System was developed according to international archival standards and methods for digitization, like OAIS, EAD, ISAD, and Metamorfoze. This ensured that these important archives are digitally sustainable for the present and future generations of Indonesia and The Netherlands, in particular.

The project was managed by a Program Board with members of the boards of both The Corts Foundation and the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI). The Program Board met several times a year to discuss the status of the project and issues program directions. Daily project operations were conducted by the General Representative of The Corts Foundation in Indonesia. An Advisory Board consisting of academics of Indonesian Universities advises and cooperated with project activities.

DASA was a multi-discipline project, as archivists, as well as scientists (historians), and technicians (IT-specialists, scan specialists) worked together in achieving the digitization and digital storage of archival information. 

TCF scanned more than 1.1 million pages, detailing with the main activities of the Archives of the High Government located at Batavia Castle. These first deliverables were presented online at the launching of the DASA website on September 26 2013 at the international archivist SARBICA conference in Bandung, Indonesia.

Between 2015 – 2018 we realised a project "European Diplomacy in Asia". This concerned research, digitization and online publication of Asian diplomatic letters to and from the High Government at the Castle of Batavia, between 1624 and 1807. This project was co-funded by the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta, Dutch Culture, “VOC- Caemer Die Haghe”;"Christiaan G. van Anrooij Fonds", "Engelbert van Bevervoorde-Van Heyst Fonds" in cooperation with "Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds" in Amsterdam. This project delivered (in English and Bahasa Indonesia): The Diplomatic Correspondence between Asian Rulers and Batavia Castle during the 17th and 18th centuries: The Digital Reconstruction of a Lost Treasure.
A subject project was derived- with co-funding of the Dutch embassy in Bangkok a project concerning the "Royal Correspondence of the Kingdom of Siam with the Supreme Government of the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) in Batavia Castle 1634-1765". Together with historians of the Chulalongkorn University we published in 2018 in the Thai and English language a digital version.

The website sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id is the only online publication in the world of scanned VOC folio on the internet. These are scans of series of the subarchive of the so-called Hoge Regering (High Government), part of the VOC-archive, next to other subarchives like Notarissen (Notary), Weeskamer (Orphanage) and Schepenbank (Legal Office).

The graph below on the left shows these subarchives in their relative proportions. On the right an overview of the scanned and published inventory numbers of Hoge Regering (PDF-download).

Harta Karun - Hidden treasures of the ANRI VOC archives
The clickable articles below are based on orginal manuscripts from the archives at ANRI and were published during the DASA project. Each article has been introduced by an historian, translated and transcribed (also in Indonesian). The article documents can be downloaded freely.
The full overview can be accessed on the website of sejarah-nusantara.