Starting in 1849 the government of the Netherlands ordered its civil servants leaving office in the East Indies colony to write a so-called memorandum of conveyance (Memorie van Overgave) for their successor. This memorandum was supposed to contain a careful review of political developments in the district concerned and also to give relevant details on places, persons and issues that the successor should know about for the proper exercise of his function. In this way a very important collection of material was built up about all areas of the Netherlands Indies, which has served as a fundamental source for historians and other students of Indonesia in the colonial period.
These memoranda were collected in two places in the Netherlands: the Ministry of the Colonies (Ministerie van Koloniën = MMK) in The Hague and the Royal Tropical Institute (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen = KIT, formerly known as the Colonial Institute) in Amsterdam, which in 1930 was given the specific task of gathering "encyclopedic" information about the East Indies. The memoranda sent to this institute were first "cleaned" of material deemed damaging by the colonial authorities, in particular politically sensitive information. Those sent to the Ministry, however, were complete.
In general, it can also be said that the Memories collected by the MMK came from the highest levels of government and administration in the East Indies, in other words they were written by departing Governors and Residents. Those collected at the KIT were more often from lower-level officials such as Assistant-Residents and Controllers.
The Memories in the MMK series are complete and are micropublished for the first time. The KIT series appeared in an earlier microform edition, but lacked a proper finding aid and was not so easily accessible due to poor organization of the material. Also it contained many extraneous documents that were not Memories.
The archivists of the National Archives of the Netherlands reorganized this collection and compiled a complete inventory of both series that through a system of cross-references helps the researcher locate whenever possible complete versions of censored or abbreviated KIT Memories in the MMK series.