Utrecht University Library digitizes earliest printed books
Utrecht University Library owns as many as about 900 books printed between 1450 and 1500, the first decades of printing in Europe. These so-called incunabula (books printed before 1501) will all be digitised in the coming years. Their catalogue descriptions will also be improved and enriched, with a special focus on the material features of each individual book such as the binding, annotations, and former owners who wrote their names in the book. The project started in early 2025 and the first scans are now online.
Digitally accessible
To make the collection optimally available for teaching and research, the library pays special attention to unique features of each book, both in its scans and its description. Andrea van Leerdam, curator of printed works: “In the first decades of printing, printed books still closely resembled manuscripts, which is why each one is unique. For example, notes or decorations were added by hand. Book bindings were often made especially for the buyer, so they are all different too. These kinds of adaptations for and by early owners say a lot about the reading culture at the time, and about how printed books were embraced as a new medium.”
The books are scanned page by page and from all sides, so that, for example, the binding and thickness of the book can also be clearly seen. Thanks to IIIF, the international standard for exchanging digital images, the scans are easy to use and share. Moreover, the text of each book is made available as full-text via automatic text recognition (OCR). The University Library has also started to describe individual copies in the international database Material Evidence in Incunabula, with the help of trainees. The aim is to have the scans and catalogue descriptions of all 900 incunabula ready by 2027.
Oldest library holdings
Utrecht University Library has one of the largest collections of incunabula in the Netherlands – only the KB National Library and Museum House of the Book have more. Many belong to the oldest holdings of the Utrecht library and are already mentioned in the first catalogue, from 1608. These books were originally part of the collections of the medieval monasteries and chapter churches in Utrecht. Remarkably, many of the books are still in an old binding, from the 15th or 16th century.
What is also special is that some 30 incunabula in the collection were printed in Utrecht. One of the first printing presses in the northern Netherlands was located there in the 1470s. The oldest dated print in the Dutch language area rolled off the press in Utrecht in 1473 by printers Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt.
Incunabula were also added to the collection after 1608. For example, as part of the Limburg monastic collections of manuscripts and old prints that ended up in Utrecht University Library from Maastricht in the mid-19th century, and as part of the Franciscan Thomaasse collection acquired by the library in 1971.
This article was first published on 17 March 2025 on Utrecht University’s website. Andrea van Leerdam is a member of the Digital Humanities team at Utrecht University Library and has provided teaching in IIIF as part of the Centre for Digital Humanities Training Programme.