Adam City Hall Accident Library

About

On April 7, 1848, Pieter Scheltema — nicknamed "Piet Perkament" — is appointed as Amsterdam's first official municipal archivist, tasked not only with preserving textual records but also with assembling a historical-topographical atlas of maps, drawings, and prints. The archive occupies the Waag building on the Nieuwmarkt from 1888 to 1914, then the former Nieuwer-Amstel town hall at Amsteldijk 67 from 1914 to 2007. Since 2007 it has been housed in the De Bazel building at Vijzelstraat 32, designed by architect Karel de Bazel. Today the archive holds more than 50 kilometers of records, along with a historical-topographical collection of millions of maps, drawings, and prints, a library, and sound, film, and photo archives. More than 440,000 of its photographs and drawings are available online. In 2019, a new storage facility completed in Amsterdam-North added a further 45 kilometers of capacity.