Tue, 9 February 2010
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The Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague has been collecting expat experiences from all over the world since 2006. In the last 18 months the collection has almost doubled.“Look, this woman sent us a file in which she had saved all the letters she wrote during her time abroad.” Elske van Holk-Van Eysinga, who joined the centre as managing director one-and-a-half years ago, is pleasantly surprised by the woman’s willingness to share her experiences.
During its short existence the Expatriate Archive Centre has collected material from around 1000 expat families.
Outpost
The archive started out as the ‘Outpost Family Archive’ of the oil company Royal Dutch Shell and became an independent foundation in 2008. Its objective is to collect and store the experiences of expats across the world.
“Not just Dutch expatriates,” says Ms Van Holk. “Eventually we want to become an international archive. I have never heard of any other archive which collects this material. I think that makes us unique.”
The Hague
The collection is available for historical, behavioural and genealogical research. It is located in a property once owned by former Shell director Mark Moody Stuart, who donated the building to the foundation.
Elske works with three other part-time paid staff and around 10 volunteers. One of their tasks is to digitalise the collection.
“Our work includes scanning documents, doing online research, finding expats who keep blogs and managing social meeting points such as Facebook and Hyves. Sometimes expats keep personal blogs about their lives. We ask them if we can download their material for our archive.”
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