The UKB received a grant from the Pica Foundation to establish a shared framework for describing books as physical objects. This allows cultural heritage institutions to make information about the materiality of books easier to find and sustainably usable. UKB is a collaboration between the Dutch university libraries and the KB National Library.

The importance of materiality

A book is more than just its content. Especially with old books from approximately 1450 to 1840, we obtain a lot of important information from things like the binding, ownership marks, annotations or use of colour. There is a great need among cultural heritage institutions and users for the uniform registration of such details. This helps scholars research the provenance of books and ensures greater focus on diverse perspectives in collections.

Esther van Gelder, the KB’s curator of early printed books: “Dutch libraries manage many unique heritage objects. This grant will help us take important strides in making these printed treasures more collectively accessible.”

Data Model

The grant from the Dutch Digital Heritage Network’s programme line is intended to achieve working agreements and a data model. With this, cultural heritage institutions will be able to collectively and systematically record the copy-related data of their books in their own catalogues. The data can then also be made available as linked data according to the principles of the National Digital Heritage Strategy. Exploratory work will be carried out in the first half of 2026.