Atria Institute on gender equality and women's history

While the materials were to be widely shared, the organization had to establish policies and procedures to deal with preservation, privacy, legalities and other concerns. Some of the issues they addressed were that the creator of the archive, not the repository (the IIAV), determines what is included in the records they donate. The second premise was that the IIAV determined the scope of the collections that they wanted to acquire, thus they are limited to women and the various women’s movements. Finally, the institute recognized that after its acquisition, the archivist had to be able to organize and preserve only those materials within the scope.[8] From its earliest beginnings, the archive was intended to be an international archive repository,[9] though the fact that the women's movements were confined at that time to Western countries and their colonial territories, shaped the character of the collected materials.[10] After the war ended, there was a shift in focus to more national concerns and almost all donations, as there was no active acquisition effort, came from Dutch women with ties to the various women's groups.[11]

In the first part of the 1970s, women's history groups at Dutch universities began utilizing the materials of the archive. Wanting better access to the materials, the first professional inventory was completed in 1980 and published in 1982. Acquisitions began in earnest for the first time since the 1930s in 1989. The focus was on documents created by ordinary women living their private lives, rather than on the public leaders of the organizations. Previous focus on leadership had left significant gaps in women's history and the birth of gender studies made documents such as personal diaries and letters gain importance. Over 700 document collections, made it imperative that the organization adopt professional preservation techniques and establish a separate archival department, which became the impetus for the 1988 merger.[12] Policy established at the creation of IIAV set forth the new policy that their collection would focus primarily on women in the Dutch women's movement, in its diverse factions. Two exceptions were added: one for archives on international conferences and organizations, and another for archives created where records might be damaged because they could not be stored properly.[13] Another important stipulation was that the records would be national in scope, thus records of local organizations or branches of national organizations are ineligible for inclusion. To coordinate which archival facilities might hold which collections, the organization maintains the Database Women's Archives (DAVA), as a reference.[14]

In 1992, the institution modified their collection policies to specifically include acquisitions from black, migrant and refugee populations and by 1998 had made the records collected to date available to the public. In 2005 another policy change created two divisions of the acquisitions area specifically focused on oral history and video records.[15]

Since the institute was not founded until 1988 and established their acquisition policy the following year, the bulk of the materials in the institution were collected in the 1980s or later. Just some of the organizational collections include, the records of the feminist organization Tegen Haar Wil (Against Her Will); the papers of a martial arts center, Kenau, where women learned self-defense;[16] the archives of the oldest Dutch women’s organization, Labor Ennobles (Dutch: Arbeid Adelt), documents of the Dutch Association of Business and Professional Women (Dutch: Nederlandsche Vereeniging van Werkende Vrouwen);[17] the archival records of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women; the archival materials of the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH); the archives of the International Federation of University Women (IFUW);[3] the records of the first Dutch Arab organization, the National Association of Single Arab Women (Dutch: Landelijke Vereniging van Alleenstaande Arabische Vrouwen); and the papers of Zami, a multi-ethnic women's organization, among others.[18] In 1992, another portion of the looted archive of IAV was discovered and after eleven years of negotiations with Moscow's Osobyi Archive was returned to Amsterdam in 2003.[3]

Among the individual archives which the institute holds are the personal papers of both Aletta Jacobs and Rosa Manus.[3] In 1994, the documents of Johanna Naber, who had willed them to IAV, but changed her will after the Nazis looted the archives, were received by the institution from her family.[16] The personal archives of Betsy Bakker-Nort[17] and Mien van Wulfften Palthe are also part of the institutes' collections.[3]

The facility as of 2012, housed more than 100,000 books, 30,000 photographs and posters, and 6,000 periodicals of women's and feminist international publications, comprising nearly 1,500 linear meters of archival materials. The ground-floor reading room contains 500 shelves of books published since 2000 and current issues of some 175 periodicals and journals, comprising around 3,500 linear meters of materials.[3]

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  Jean de Marconville: Der vrouwen lof ende lasteringe, 1578, an early Dutch translation of De la bonté et mauvaistié des femmes, 1563. The oldest book in the Atria library collection.
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  Johanna Naber (1859-1941) around 1898, Dutch feminist and cofounder
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  Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), Dutch feminist and cofounder
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  Quote of Belle van Zuylen on a wall at the office of Atria. "I lack talent for subservience", translation of Je n'ai pas les talents subalternes (letter to James Boswell).
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  Atria library
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  Atria library. Lockers with a portrait of Aletta Jacobs

• Atria website
• Atria page on the history of the collection

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