Open Archivaris is a closed archive of documents retrieved from Dutch government websites between 6 October 2020 and 30 July 2021. The crawl has stopped and will not resume.
The crawl spans ten months; the content spans two decades
This distinction determines correct usage and is easily misunderstood. The crawl ran for ten months, but the documents it found were created from around 2000 onwards. The median is around 2016, and 129,364 documents date from before 2010.
The useful description is therefore not “a snapshot from 2021”, but “what was still available on government websites in mid-2021”. For the question “what did this administrative body publish in 2013?”, this is therefore often the best source in this system.
What’s inside
Recorded on 15 August 2026: 2,046,150 documents.
What makes it unique
- It is the only source here whose content has been taken from the open web rather than being recorded in a register. Anything an organisation posted on its website without formally publishing it appears here but not on Officiële Bekendmakingen;
- It is the only source that systematically includes content that has since been removed from a website. A document that an organisation removed in 2022 may still be available here.
The limitation that determines everything
The archive is closed. Nothing has been added since 30 July 2021, and nothing further will be added. Any enquiries regarding the current situation should therefore be directed to one of the six other sources. This source is deliberately listed last in the order of selection.
A negative result simply means that this document was not found on any government website visited during the crawl period.
Other restrictions
- There is a request limit of 120 calls per minute;
- The coverage depends on how far the crawl has progressed, and this is not broken down by administrative body. There is therefore no list stating ‘these organisations are fully included’;
- The documents are copies of material that appeared on a website. They are not certified and do not replace the official document held by the source.
Address and tools
Address: https://besluitbron.nl/mcp/openarchivaris/v1.
search_documents: search within the text of the archived documents. Each word in the search query must appear in the same document;get_document: a single document containing its metadata and the location where it was found;get_document_text: the full text of a document;list_partiess: the parties mentioned in the archive;list_party_forms: the various spellings under which an organisation has been found. A crawl of the open web reveals that the same organisation appears under several different names;list_sourcess: the sources that have been crawled;corpus_stats: the size and distribution of the corpus over time;export_documents: to execute a set of results in bulk;list_platform_calls: the calls to the platform in this session.
In addition, list_capabilities.
Every word must appear, from version 1.3.58 onwards
Up to and including version 1.3.57, this source was the only one that searched for documents containing any one of the specified words, rather than all of them. As a result, two words yielded the sum of both. Measured on 18 August 2026: woo besluit returned 837,263 documents, whilst there are 2,592 documents containing both words.
From version 1.3.58 onwards, each word must appear in the same document, as is the case with every other source here. A search query that previously returned thousands of results now often returns far fewer, and that is the intended behaviour.
It remains necessary to narrow down the search. Even a single everyday word covers a large proportion of the archive in this corpus: ‘gemeente’ appears in 1,237,307 documents and ‘besluit’ in 834,924. You should therefore use a distinctive term or narrow down your search by specifying a specific body or administrative level.
Where to find this platform
These addresses belong to the organisation behind this source and not to BesluitBron. Anyone who finds an error in the data or in this source’s API should report it there:
- Report an error: contact details on openarchivaris.nl ;
- Reading the API: this platform does not publish any documentation for its API;
- Search for yourself on the source’s website: openarchivaris.nl .
This archive is managed by the same foundation as BesluitBron. There is no public documentation for the API: the index is accessed using the same data as that used by the archive’s own search page.
These addresses were checked on 18 August 2026. No email address has been included deliberately: where a party publishes only an address, BesluitBron refers to the page on which that address appears.
What this source is suitable for
This concerns what a public body has published on its website in the past, including documents that have since been removed. The crawl ran for ten months, but the documents found date from around 2000, with a median date of around 2016.
What it is not for
For any enquiries regarding the current situation, for the reason stated above. Nor should it be regarded as evidence of what has been formally published: an archived website is a copy of what was previously published and is not an authenticated document. For that, please refer to Officiële Bekendmakingen as the source.
Current situation, as of August 2026
This source is no longer up to date and will not be updated in future. The crawl ran from 6 October 2020 to 30 July 2021 and has now stopped. The owner has confirmed that the crawl will not be resumed.
On the Laadstatus, this source is therefore listed as “closed” rather than “inactive”. An end date does not constitute a backlog. Marking that source in red would teach a reader to ignore anything marked in red on that page.