NAVYDOC – MARINES
An exclusive media library of the naval forces
In 1998, the Royal Circle Georges Lecointe and Friends of the Naval Section of the MRA non-profit organizations signed an agreement to transfer their archives, donations and bequests to the Royal Museum of the Army, so that the latter could manage and preserve them as part of the Nation's heritage.
Every Tuesday, a team of volunteers works on processing and encoding documents that were unconditionally and irrevocably handed over by seafaring families and maritime associations.
This inventory includes the archiving of the past twelve years. Updates and additions will be published later and regularly added to the MRA database.
The work continues under the supervision of the Documentation Center and with the help of its permanent team.
The Royal Army Museum, which already had an important collection of various documents - although scattered in the general classification - transferred by the Naval Force, the merchant navy or the fishing sector, agreed on May 19, 1998, to regroup it and merge it with the NAVYDOC fund created in the 1980s, on the initiative of the Royal Circle Georges Lecointe, the association of former cadets of maritime education and school ships.
Over the years, thanks to donations and bequests from sailors, their families or maritime associations, a collection of thousands of publications and reference works has been built up. A dedication, affixed in each book and included in the computer database, offers the legal guarantee of the perpetuity of donations and bequests and their irreversible inscription in the national heritage.
Navydoc-Marines observes the directives of the Documentation Center of the Royal Museum of the Army and Military History (www.klm-mra.be). In this respect, it is the "Maritime Documentation Center" housed in the premises and furniture of the Marine Section of the Museum, currently room G015A of the great hall. The archiving of documents on paper or computer media is handled according to the adopted protocol. The inventoried entries have the irrevocable character of State heritage. The "Friends of the Marine Section" entrust their documentation and the contributions of their members to the "Marine Documentation Center" managed by the volunteers of Navydoc-Marines.