Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections

Indonesian Serials (NIOD)

World War II and Revolution

Indonesian Serials (NIOD)

This digital collection consists of 49 rare newspapers and magazines published during the period of World War II and the Indonesian National Revolution. The publications form a valuable source of information on the Second World War in Indonesia and the early years of the Republic of Indonesia. The titles originate from various islands and cater to different groups of readers such as Muslims, Chinese, women and children. They are in Indonesian and Dutch. Whereas in the first year of the war the Indonesian journalists and editors still enjoyed relative freedom in their professional work, strict censorship later turned most newspapers and magazines to mouthpieces of the Japanese administration. An interesting feature of this collection is that some publications contain artwork by young painters who later became successful Indonesian artists. Among them are Affandi and Henk Ngantung.

Examples of the periodicals include the Jakarta-based newspaper Asia Raya, the illustrated magazine Minami from Medan, the China-oriented newspaper Min Pao published in Jakarta, and the weekly newspaper Flores from the island of Flores in Eastern Indonesia. Another well-known title online available in this digital collection is Balai Poestaka’s Pandji Poestaka (Batavia).

This digital collection was produced by NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (https://www.niod.nl/en) in Amsterdam. The physical publications are kept at the NIOD library. Most titles are available as well in the collections of Leiden University Libraries and KITLV (the latter managed by Leiden University Libraries since 2016). You can browse the Library’s online catalogue to find out which issues are kept in Leiden: https://catalogue.leidenuniv.nl/primo-explore/search.

The periodicals are full-text searchable. Please bear in mind that the print quality of the original material is in some cases rather low. This may result in incorrect readings by the Optical Character Recognition.