In 2015, the board of Amsterdam-based historical society Amstelodamum approached me to help them bring their digital archive back online, containing magazines and yearbooks dating back to 1902.

About the project

These are some of the key challenges for this project:

• using OCR text-recognition software to create full-text assets for each digitized resource
• building an Elasticsearch index and a simple standalone API application based on Express (NodeJS) to make this index available from the website
• creating a WordPress plugin to authenticate with the Elasticsearch application to make an archive overview and a full-text search feature available to everyone visiting the society’s website.

Three years after the application was launched, the society’s archive was included in a large-scale digitization project of the municipal archives (archief.amsterdam), making the digital archive obsolete.

What I learned from this project

Through this project, I was able to get hands-on experience with various aspects of digital archiving. It also demanded a deep-dive into NodeJS application development:

• Building an API architecture with Express
• Handling Elasticsearch indexing and interactions with their official JS library
• Building an API-integration into a standalone WordPress plugin

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