Introduction to the special issue on Dutch overseas emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth century Abstract-Invisibility and selectivity. Introduction to the special issue on Dutch overseas emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth century The contributors to this special issue describe the emigration of people from the Netherlands to the most important overseas destinations (the usa, Canada and Australia) in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Part of the Dutch (overseas) emigrants formed strongly separated communities. Dutch emigrants were also rather invisible. In North America we see a combination of separateness and invisibility, in Australia mainly invisibility. Both in the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, migration was highly selective (with differences according to religion, class, ethnicity and gender). Only in the twentieth century (and especially after 1945) there was a strong influence of government policy on migration. In this issue, the comparison of emigration from one country-the Netherlands-to several destinations and the comparison over time show the influences of the societal context of the country of origin on the formation of Dutch emigrant communities. At a recent conference, organised by the Dutch Centre on Migration Studies, it was concluded that Dutch emigration is under-researched. 1 This special issue is the result of a call for papers in response to this observation, and attempts to fill at least part of this void. 2 It presents five studies on Dutch

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The past decades have changed the way we deal with archives and archival materials. Archives digitised their inventories and part of their collections, but they were joined by many other parties who published archival collections and archive-worthy materials on the web. The information world is in continuous flux, and the developments have made clear that archives and libraries have lost much of their position as the vested authorities of information access. They are challenged by technological parties and citizen science that have as yet not established themselves in definitive positions as information brokers. We propose to analyse the field in terms of information authority, a composite of many different aspects that all contribute to its importance, availability and use. In this article, we first explore the issue of (information) authority in the digital realm, and explain why we choose a conflict metaphor to analyse the different types of partners in the information ecosystem. Digital archives call for cooperation and openness as information is ‘everywhere’, but this is hard to realise as it requires translating intentions into technical means. To maintain their position of authority, archives adopt standards and regulations. We argue that openness is the key, but hard to organise with the existing standards because they are used in monolithic ways that make it hard to combine information. Combining asks for methods from established scholarly and archival disciplines as well as from technology. Furthermore, sharing and cooperation require a harmonisation of contexts: the different contexts in which information is created and organised need to be aligned to understand how collections can be combined across different dimensions. This calls for providing (structured) metadata that define the scope of a collection, to allow one to determine whether combining information is useful. At the moment, the state of affairs is in flux and there is no fixed methodology. In the last part, we explore ways to facilitate and evaluate interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on methodology to address the preceding challenges of producing quality, in all realms.

Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants' life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data-serial and qualitative-for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project "Migrant: Mobilities and Connection" as an example and case study of this life course-centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide.Global migration is one of the defining characteristics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Alexander Betts noted in 2015, "There is greater human mobility than ever before. In 1970, there were 70 million international migrants; today there are well over 200 million" (Betts 2015). With globalization, the opportunity and