Dutch collections - STCN project
The Library has recently embarked on a project to report its holdings of early printed Dutch books to the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN).
Cambridge University Library's early Dutch collections comprise some 13,000 books either printed in the Netherlands before 1801 (in any language), or Dutch-language works printed abroad during the same period. These will be reported to the STCN, the Dutch retrospective bibliography for the period 1540–1800 (also included are concise descriptions of Dutch post-incunabula), making this important part of our collections more widely known to the international scholarly community. Around 20% of our holdings are estimated to be unique titles for the STCN, so the reporting of our collections will greatly expand knowledge of book production in the Netherlands and abroad in the early modern period. The fact that so many (potentially unique) copies of books survive only outside the country in which they were printed illustrates the importance of international collaboration in this field of research.
In a complementary project, full copy-specific descriptions of the Library's outstanding collection of Dutch incunabula will be added to the Library's online Newton catalogue as part of a five-year programme to catalogue all of the Library's fifteenth-century printed books.
The STCN project is a collaboration between European Collections and Cataloguing and the Rare Books Department of Cambridge University Library. For further information, please contact Dr Jaap Harskamp.
Progress report : 3,948 titles have been reported to the STCN to date, of which 463 are unique (December 2010).