The Netherlands

An overview of the Netherlands collection

  • Content: publications related to the Netherlands.
  • Size: around 7 million objects (books, newspapers, magazines), including a growing number of digital and digitised publications.
  • Access: can be found via the KB catalogue. Cannot be lent out but are available for inspection in the reading room.
  • More informationArno Kuipers and Gert-Jan van Velzen.

About the Netherlands collection

The Netherlands collection contains all publications published in the Netherlands. It also includes all publications from abroad about the Dutch language, culture and history. The collection covers the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands, including the Caribbean part. We want to make this collection as complete as possible and track down and add publications from the past, including from and about former colonies such as the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. 

The Netherlands collection is very broad: from medieval manuscripts to contemporary publications and from digital files to physical objects. This is a heritage collection and everything in it is permanently preserved and made accessible.

History of the collection

The core of the Netherlands collection is the Depot van Nederlandse Publicaties (Depository of Dutch Publications). This depot began in 1974 and Dutch publishers have been sending their publications to the KB ever since. The Netherlands collection therefore contains all publications published in the Netherlands. Almost all Dutch publications from 1974 onwards can be found in the KB. The KB does have a large proportion of books published in the Netherlands prior to that time, but not everything. We are trying to make the collection as complete as possible through purchases and donations.

When the KB officially became the national library of the Netherlands in 1982, the Netherlands collection became the KB's core collection. Since the 1990s, the collection has also included digital publications.

Accessibility of the Netherlands collection

You can view publications from the Netherlands collection in the reading room. They cannot be lent out.