Meertens Institute / KNAW Humanities Cluster
The Meertens Institute is an institute of the Royal Netherlands' Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was founded in 1932 as a bureau for the documentation of Dutch dialects. In later years, Dutch ethnology and onomastics have been included in the documentative tasks of the institute. At this moment, the Meertens Institute is primarily a research institute with substantial collections in the fields of language variation, European ethnology and onomastics. In the past 10 years the institute has worked on making these collections available in a digital format and in open access through the website of the institute (https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/cms/nl/databanken). Recently, the Meertens’ collections are becoming available to the research community using CLARIN infrastructure guidelines and best practices. In addition, the Meertens Institute has developed, in collaboration with other CLARIN partners, a variety of tools and services are developed that may be accessed through the institute’s servers.
The institute is an active participant in the Dutch CLARIN organisation. It leads large infrastructure projects such as Search&Develop and TTNWW, and it is involved in the IIP infrastructure project. It also participates in several smaller Clarin-projects, Marc Kemps-Snijders is the Dutch representative in the CLARIN EU centre committee. The institute is represented in the Executive Board of CLARIN-NL (Bennis) and in the National Advisory Panel (Barbiers, Brugman, Kemps Snijders). Moreover, Bennis represents the Netherlands in the CLARIN-EU Scientific Board.