Brabants’ heritage 25 year at Tilburg Uni
In 2010 the Noord-Brabant Film-and photo archives, part of the Brabant Collection, which is located at Tilburg University, received nearly 60.000 visitors. In another database, the Brabant Databank, 8000 searches were performed, figures by the Brabant Collection show.
The Brabant collection desk suffered a fall in visitor numbers because it had to stop its services for a great part due to the big library renovation from 15 October 2009 to May 31, 2010. “But we now have our own – completely renovated – spot in the library with its own desk,” says librarian Jos Kuijlen.
“Most of our visitors are amateur historians, who are looking for articles, books and chapters in books about the history of the province North Brabant. In the future we hope to offer complete scans of all this material, it would make complete texts available to read on the internet”, he adds.
The Brabant Database contains descriptions of more than 100,000 books and articles, of recent date early printed editions dated before 1801. Valuable books, historical prints, and manuscripts can be viewed in a special room but cannot be borrowed. The Film and Photo Bank consists of 350,000 photos and 1100 videos.
The Brabant Collection is housed in the library at Tilburg University 25 years now. To celebrate this it organizes a mini-symposium on public participation called ‘Jij en wij: Feest u mee?’ on September 29. Kuijlen: “During the symposium we want to discuss how to make the large number of historical photographs of Brabant, ours but also those of other people, accessible to everyone via the Internet.”
