Arkivalieronline Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives) Digital Records Viewer

History and Background

Arkivalieronline is the online digitised records viewer of the Rigsarkivet, Denmark's National Archives. The Danish National Archives trace their institutional origins to the 14th century, with the formal merger of the royal and state archives occurring by law in 1889. In 2014 the entire Danish archival system was reorganised and centralised under the name Rigsarkivet. Arkivalieronline provides free public access to all digitised records in the Rigsarkivet's collection. Digitisation has proceeded primarily through the scanning of microfiches and microfilms, with a particular focus on parish registers and population censuses. The platform operates within the broader suite of Rigsarkivet's digital research tools, alongside the catalogue database Daisy and the Digidata repository.

Collections and Holdings

Arkivalieronline currently holds over 100 million scanned document pages, representing approximately 2% of the Rigsarkivet's total physical holdings. The digitised collections are particularly strong in genealogical source types: parish registers (births, confirmations, marriages, and burials), population censuses, military rolls (lægdsruller and søruller), estate inventories (skiftearkivalier), land and property registers (tingbøger, brandforsikringsprotokoller, matrikler), and records from the Danish chancelleries, ministries, and the royal house. Records from Denmark's colonial period in the Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) are progressively being added. The platform also holds thousands of digitised civil registrations, name lists from Prussian authorities, and material from Danish overseas communities.

Relevance to Journalism and Media History

The Rigsarkivet's holdings of government and ministerial records accessible through Arkivalieronline include documentation relevant to the history of press regulation, censorship, and media policy in Denmark. Additionally, the digitised population censuses and civil registration records have been used in large-scale historical research projects, including the Link-Lives initiative at Copenhagen University, which studies occupational patterns across Danish society in the nineteenth century.

Access and Usage

Arkivalieronline is freely accessible to all users without registration. Documents can be viewed page by page in a digital image viewer, and individual images may be downloaded for personal use. Bulk downloads require prior permission from the Rigsarkivet. Ancestry has contributed colour digitisation of church books up to 1892 and has specific terms restricting commercial downloads. Contact for questions is via the Rigsarkivet's email. Most content is in Danish, and older materials use Gothic script.