While Indonesian perspectives of history have begun to dissipate, the Dutch archives, Van Klinken said, are pristine. This experience would inspire him to write the 2019 journal article “Endangered When newspaper archives crumble, history dies”. “ are an absolute wasteland to research,” said Van Klinken, recalling the challenges he faced while studying Kupang, a town in which none of its nine Indonesian-language newspapers from the 1930s have survived completely. Van Klinken told The Jakarta Post that while accounts of Indonesia’s last century have been passed on through oral histories, as this generation passes away, preserving Indonesian newspapers is essential “if we want a history that’s real, that’s human, that has flesh and blood in it”. Scanning the headlines: Faisal Huzein digitizes a newspaper at the Preservation Center (JP/Kate Newsome) “The Indonesian voice in history is being throttled by natural decay, neglect, and sometimes corruption,” said Gerry van Klinken, an honorary research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Of the issues that are microfilmed, only 11,000 are identified as being in good condition. They consist of more than 16 million separate rare newspaper pages. In total, 1.6 million newspaper issues are held by Perpusnas. “The facilities are inadequate and newspapers have second priority to be digitized compared with manuscripts,” added Wirantna Tritawirasta, coordinator of Perpusnas’ preservation team. “If you’re trying to extract information from the newspaper if you are looking for article, it’s impossible,” said Faisal. Even for the newspapers that are on Khastara, the system does not allow users to search by text.
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