Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

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The STCN (Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands) covers the period from the first Dutch products of the printing-press to the year 1800. In this period the Netherlands developed into a leading country economically, scientifically, and culturally and became one of the world’s most important book-producing countries. Therefore, the Dutch bibliography is of the utmost importance for scholars in the Netherlands as well as the rest of the world.

The STCN is the Dutch national bibliography until 1800. Eventually the STCN-database will hold all books published to that date within the present borders of the Netherlands as well as all books printed in Dutch abroad.

The STCN is being produced by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) in Den Haag (The Hague), on the basis of its own collections and the collections of other major and smaller libraries inside and outside the Netherlands. The activities started in 1982.

At the moment, all Dutch holdings 1540-1700 in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the university libraries of Amsterdam and Leiden have been described. The work on the collection 1540-1800 of the university library in Utrecht is in progress, as well as the description of the 18th century holdings of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Also, some 12,000 Dutch editions from the period 1622-1700 in the British Library are being processed.

All books produced in the Northern Netherlands before 1540 had already been described in the Dutch incunable and postincunable bibliographies. Concise descriptions derived from these were added to the STCN, using data from the ISTC (Incunable Short Title Catalogue) as well. For the time being, Dutch books printed in what is now Belgium are not included. The same goes for newspapers and broadsheets (single leaves printed on one side only). At the moment the STCN amounts to c. 80,000 descriptions. The estimate is that it will eventually contain some 300,000 titles.

The STCN sets a high value to bibliographic accuracy and consistency. All books are described according to the principles of modern analytical bibliography, which means that the descriptions are made with the book in hand.

The records are provided with a collational formula and a fingerprint (the unique identification of every edition).

Authors can be found both by a standardised name and by the variant name or spelling on the title page.

An elaborate account of the aims and principles of the STCN and a historical survey may be found in: J.A. Gruys, P.C.A. Vriesema & C. de Wolf `Dutch national bibliography 1540-1800: the STCN’, in Quaerendo 13 (1983), 149-160.

The descriptive model used by the STCN is set down in: Handleiding voor de medewerkers aan de STCN. 2nd rev. ed. ‘s-Gravenhage, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1988 (1st ed. 1977).

The STCN fingerprint is discussed in detail in: P.C.A. Vriesema, `The STCN-fingerprint’, in Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986), 93-100.